The womb: a site of domination and resistance in the Pre-emancipation British Caribbean

Abstract

Beginning in the 1780s, British Caribbean plantocracies faced the looming threat of slave trade abolition which would end the flow of enslaved labour fundamental to colonial plantation economies. Enslaved women’s function as the source of blackness and legal slave status made their wombs essential to a future without readily available slave imports. The general narrative centring the intensifying colonial domination of enslaved women’s wombs highlight abolitionists and slave owner’s deployment of slave women’s reproductive labour in a slave-breeding program that would produce a self-sustaining source of labour. This narrative neglects the agency enslaved women exerted in exacting control over their sexuality, marriage status, pregnancies, childbirth experience, and child-rearing process that jeopardised the institution of slavery in “gynecological revolt.” This essay privileges the feminized, unarmed, sexual, bodily defiance of enslaved women within the greater, often masculinized Caribbean slavery scholarship to argue that the womb was a site of intensifying colonial domination in the Age of Abolition but more significantly a site of women’s revolutionary struggle against slavery.

Keywords

• gynecological revolt
• British Caribbean
• Jamaica
• slave abolition
• enslaved women
• slavery