Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans by Emily A. Owens (review)

Reviewed by: Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans by Emily A. Owens David Stefan Doddington (bio) Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans. By Emily A. Owens. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 244. Cloth, 99. 00; paper, 19. 95. ) In this nuanced and engaging study, Emily A. Owens makes expert use of a diverse range of source material and refined theoretical positioning to address the complex sexual lives of enslaved women in antebellum New Orleans. Through a series of vividly conceptualized case studies of women who were "stationed as enslaved concubines and enslaved prostitutes" (17), End Page 254 Owens underlines the structural and interpersonal violence that underpinned and regulated all sex in slavery. As Owens notes, this "sexual violence was not primarily spectacular, but an everyday occurrence; … slave society ritualized, invited, and normalized violent sex against Black women in the language of their own desires" (14). With her approach, Owens offers a beautifully rendered social history of not only New Orleans but also the wider Atlantic world, addressing revolutionary reverberations in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americas, legal structures and cultural forces, and the dynamics of power—both subtle and overt—in slave societies. Consent in the Presence of Force defies simple categorization. It is at once a cultural and legal history of an Atlantic world, with Owens making excellent use of complex legal records covering French, Spanish, and English statutes, customs, and court materials to address the lives of select enslaved women through case studies and microhistories. It is a book that provides a richly tapestried social history of antebellum New Orleans, with fresh insights on space and power and evocative writing used to press home the day-to-day violence in, and wider dynamics of, this slave society. As Owens vividly shows (and creatively extends upon), "The docket books of the antebellum New Orleans lower courts describe a city that was throbbing with violence" (56). Hers is a piece of work that acknowledges the ambiguities and unknowability of the inner lives of people ensnared within slavery, but that nonetheless upholds the importance of "painstaking archival practice as an expression of the honor to our subjects" (6). Combining deep archival research and speculative readings with rich contextual detail, Owens destabilizes neat binaries and clear-cut narratives of resistance, accommodation, and survival. With obvious appreciation for, but also critical reading of, foundational Black feminist scholarship, Owens insists on the necessity of rethinking classic formulations about sex in (and out of) slavery. This need comes to the fore precisely because of Owens's sensitive engagement with the experiences of women who she "contingently and cautiously calls the <'women who said yes'" (106). By focusing on women whose "sexual service often looked more like an ongoing transaction than a momentary act of acute violence" (17), Owens aims to unsettle the notion that a binary of force/consent is a viable analytical tool through which to explore enslaved women's experiences and survival strategies, and to underscore instead the broader interpersonal and structural violence that enslaved women had to navigate through and negotiate with. As she notes when assessing the actions of Ann Maria Barclay, who was freed and yet "returned to New Orleans, to the household and the bed of the man who End Page 255 had previously owned her, " such activities do not speak to "false consciousness" or to "acting against her own interests" (107). Barclay's "participation in and return to transactional sex indexes her discernment of the world in which she lived and her theorization of a livable life within that world" (107). There is excellent work surrounding affective meanings and sex, as in chapter 2's retelling of the sexual terrorism Harriet Jacobs faced from her enslaver James Norcom. While acknowledging the specificity to Jacobs's story (as well as its geographical distance from New Orleans), Owens triangulates it with case studies to emphasize how, although "the law preempted the possibility of an enslaved woman's consent to sex, … slaveholders spent time, money, and energy pursuing it" (61), and convincingly articulates how. . .