Hierarchies and honour among enslaved men in the antebellum South
When exploring the histories of male slaves in the antebellum South, there remains a tendency for them to feature as a singular entity; the failures and successes of male slaves are often discussed as all encompassing and identical. However, in defining male slaves as a monolithic entity seeking to affirm manhood in the face of oppression and attempted emasculation by white society, there is a danger that we remain wedded to a âwhite/blackâ dichotomy that neglects the complexity of interactions among enslaved people and issues of intersectionality. It is vital that we do not ignore the plurality of gender as a social and cultural construct and the manner in which enslaved people conceptualised and created gender identities from a variety of different attributes and ideals. Scholars have increasingly made it clear that socially becoming âmaleâ or âfemaleâ was not biological destiny in the antebellum South, but there remains comparatively less attention to the multiplicity of masculinities among enslaved men. Yet enslaved men were not a homogenous body and nor was there a single understanding of what being a man meant in slave communities. Multiple understandings of, and a variety of ideals, were
Doddington, David Stefan
F001 United States local history
Hierarchies and honour among enslaved men in the antebellum South. When exploring the histories of male slaves in the antebellum South, there remains a tendency for them to feature as a singular entity; the failures and successes of male slaves are often discussed as all encompassing and identical. However, in defining male slaves as a monolithic entity seeking to affirm manhood in the face of oppression and attempted emasculation by white society, there is a danger that we remain wedded to a âwhite/blackâ dichotomy that neglects the complexity of interactions among enslaved people and issues of intersectionality. It is vital that we do not ignore the plurality of gender as a social and cultural construct and the manner in which enslaved people conceptualised and created gender identities from a variety of different attributes and ideals. Scholars have increasingly made it clear that socially becoming âmaleâ or âfemaleâ was not biological destiny in the antebellum South, but there remains comparatively less attention to the multiplicity of masculinities among enslaved men. Yet enslaved men were not a homogenous body and nor was there a single understanding of what being a man meant in slave communities. Multiple understandings of, and a variety of ideals, were
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