International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
The intersection of men, masculinity and slavery provides a site for examining the formation of male subjectivities within slavery. Slavery, a social relation in which people own other people as legal property, has been practised in all of the world’s civilisations and cultures. Prisoners of war, victims of raids, criminals, debtors and foreigners have been enslaved by ancient, classical, medieval and modern societies.
Slavery in classical Greece, Rome and medieval Islam was patriarchal and paternalistic. Rodriguez (1997) notes that the Greeks perceived slavery as a natural relationship that required inferiors—wives and slaves—to obey their superior—husbands and masters. The Judeo-Christian belief in the natural inequalities in human relations served as a justification for slavery in Brazil and the antebellum Southern United States (Pleck 2004). Unlike modern slavery, early societies scarcely employed race or ethnicity to distinguish between slave and master. Race hierarchy coded white middle-class heterosexual Protestant and northern European men as innately superior to Negroid and Mongoloid races and therefore suited for self-government (Kimmel 1994).
Slave societies maintained differing attitudes towards slaves’ rights. Nevertheless, bondage exerts undue control over slaves and their maleness.
Slave codes seldom legitimise slaves’ rights to marry, maintain a family, testify in court, own property, read and write. In the Americas, slave laws reduced Negroes and Amerindian men to chattels of their masters and not as owners of their own bodies and souls. Slaves were forced to perform traditionally female tasks and occasionally castrated either to serve as eunuchs for the emperor’s court, as in the Chinese and Ottoman empires, or to deny their manhood and kinship ties, as in the United States (Rodriguez 1997). In classical Greece, enslaved men were compelled to engage in the submissive role in homosexual intercourse.
Despite the constraints that curtailed their masculine privilege, enslaved men developed their own modifications of masculinity in order to claim and preserve their manhood within the economies of slavery.
References and further reading
Kimmel, M.S. (1994) ‘Masculinity as homophobia’, in H.Brod and M.Kaufman (eds) Theorizing Masculinities, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 119–41.
Pleck, J.H. (2004) ‘Men’s power with women, other men and society’, in P.F.Murphy (ed.) Feminism and Masculinities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 57–68.
Rodriguez, J.P. (1997) ‘Gender’, in J.P.Rodriguez (ed.) The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, pp. 298–301.
See also: racism; subordinate masculinity; violence
SAMUELADU-POKU
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