Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West

Abstract

Rape and the inner lives of Black women in the Middle West: Preliminary thoughts on the culture of dissemblance One of the most remarked upon but least analyzed themes in Black women's history deals with Black women's sexual vulnerability and powerlessness as victims of rape and domestic violence. Author Hazel Carby put it baldly when she declared: "The institutionalized rape of black women has never been as powerful a symbol of black oppression as the spectacle of lynching. Rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting a sexual attack. The links between black women and illicit sexuality consolidated during the antebellum years had powerful ideological consequences for the next hundred and fifty years."' I suggest that rape and the threat of rape influenced the development of a culture of dissemblance among Black women. By dissemblance I mean the behavior and attitudes of Black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors. To be sure, themes of rape and sexual vulnerability have received considerable attention in the recent literary outpourings of Black women novelists. Of the last six novels I have read and reread, for example, five contained a rape scene or a graphic description of domestic violence.' Moreover, this is not a recent phenomenon in Black women's writing. Virtually every known nineteenth-century female slave narrative contains a reference to, at some juncture, the ever present threat and reality of rape. Two works come immediately to mind: Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, I benefited greatly from conversations with D. Barry Gaspar and Deborah Gray White. I am grateful to Tiffany Patterson and to Elsa Barkley Brown for their comments.

Shattering Silence: Exploring Barriers to Disclosure for African American Sexual Assault Survivors

“…Historians such as Higginbotham (1992) and Hines (1989) have documented the association between African American women's sexual exploitation and African American women's labor. They suggest that throughout African American women's economic history in the United States, sexual abuse has been identified as an occupational hazard.…”

Victim, Risqué, Provocateur: Popular Cultural Narratives of Rihanna's Experience of Intimate Partner Violence

“…She functioned primarily in the role of a seductive, hypersexual, exploiter of men's weaknesses. (Jewell 1993) Historically, this image has been the most protested and challenged by Black women (Hines 1989), however, it persists and continues to be a frequent representation (Aymer 2011, 354). Intertwined with other historical, yet stereotypical, images such as Mammy and Sapphire, Black women are all too often categorised around limited typologies (Aymer 2011, 354).…”

Charity Folks, Lost Royalty, and the Bishop Family of Maryland and New York

“…Indeed, Douglass suggested that Colonel Edward Lloyd fathered Sall Wilkes's son William, who grew up enslaved, but away from his mother on Lloyd's Wye Plantation in Talbot County. 18 If they did not experience it personally, they knew other women who did. 16 Douglass noted that free black pastors and businessmen in Annapolis, who shared social ties with Charity Folks and her kin, had negotiated Wilkes's freedom.…”