NOTE NEW DATE: this is now scheduled for WEDNESDAY, February 8. It was originally scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 9. 

Emily A. Owens, David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown, researches and teaches about U.S. slavery, the legal history of race and sexual violence and the intellectual history of American feminisms. She is most interested in the ways that massive cultural, legal and economic systems shape intimate life across different historical moments. This talk takes stock of the legal and ideological underpinnings of violence against enslaved women. Owens unpacks the legal doctrine of rape law to elaborate what Harriet Jacobs knew almost two hundred years ago, that is, that “no shadow of law” existed to protect black women from “from insult, from violence, or even from death…inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.” In addition to analyzing the legal structure that invited sexual contact with black women under any circumstance, Owens returns to Jacobs to think through the cultural value of consent. Owens shows that the legal impossibility of rape and the slaveholders’ insistence on black women’s utterance of consent together unlock the puzzle of (slaveholding) sexual violence: when sex is articulated as a transaction, women become imagined as culpable for the harm done to them. This is the annual Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06’09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Free and open to the public.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.