“Perverse Domesticity”: The Gender of White Supremacy in Antebellum Slavery

Abstract In this article, I read slave narratives by Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, Ellen and William Craft, and Silvia Dubois, as theory alongside black feminist and trans theory to tease out an underlying thread of thought that often goes unnoticed in the work of both—a critique of the gender performance of white supremacy grounded in its material reality of slavery rather than its ideological legacy of normativity. Much work has been done to examine the gender variance that antiblack racism imposed upon the enslaved. This article shifts perspectives to ask: What was the gender performance of white supremacy under its own crafted and designed conditions of slavery? How did this material reality create the conditions under which enslaved people were subsequently racialized as gender deviants? In an era just before the solidification of gender and sexuality as categories of personhood in the field of “sexology,” material practices in the antebellum South reveal that white gender and sexual behavior in the slave economy upended prevailing social ideologies about gender roles in enslaved communities and in white southern households, flying in the face of the contention made popular by Gone with the Wind (1936) that normative domesticity congealed in this latter space.