The enjoyment of mastery and paradigm of property is deeply rooted in the racially charged practices from the American Chattel Slavery and are now fostered in contemporary homosocial discourse. It is essential to interrogate these economies of enjoyment with the analysis of reproduction of erotogenic spectacles of blackness and its value to queer sexual economies.

For my dissertation, I intend to unearth a genealogy of white same-sex sexual violence against Black men, specifically focusing on queer men or those engaging in sex acts with other men, from the late eighteenth century to the present within literary, legal, and historical archives. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Sharon Holland, and E. Patrick Johnson have written on how the racial quotidian, particularly within the study of sexuality, localizes expressions of racially charged modes of sexual abuse within an economy of enjoyment. However, disentangling the ways that queer sex acts have actively created paradigms that continue to develop Antebellum scripts generates insights into the evolution of such practices in ways that not only connect these to plantation life but that also track how they transformed to better serve white supremacist economies of enjoyment since slavery. I’m developing a theory to make legible the existence of Black enslaved people whose lives are obscured in an attempt to protect queer American life from knowledge of its genealogy in the practices of antebellum slavery. My methodology incorporates practices of close reading, contextual analysis, and cultural analysis informed by approaches found in texts such as Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman, Rethinking Rufus by Thomas A. Foster, and The Delectable Negro by Vincent Woodard. The materials obscured within archives of American chattel slavery highlight a gap in the humanities and social sciences that underscores the socio-political response to the sexual abuse of black queer men from the Antebellum period to the present. The proprietorial bindings of enslavement contribute to the petri dish of queer sexual discourse the necessary ideological fragments needed to buttress functioning economies that hold stock in clandestine racialized corporeal markets. I use “clandestine” to note the illegibility of existing archival materials holding these non-normative sexual economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to highlight ways in which failing to identify these moments plainly undermines efforts to fully understand the history of contemporary queer sexual discourses. Whether to maintain the sense of injury of white queerness or to securitize the perimeters of Queer Studies, debates on the “appropriate” use of the term queer in relation to the 19th-century contexts disavow this form of sexual abuse found in the archive and (despite evidence of its occurrence) renders it illegible. White queer forms of sexual abuse practiced by white slaveholding men instilled into queer sexual discourses a metric of pleasure that is directly linked to the economies of enjoyment within plantation life. These sexual gestures make up the enterprises within these economies of enjoyment that depend on the consumption and circulation of sexualized black bodies to be the lifeblood of, as Edward Baptist writes, “a complex of inseparable fetishes.” In an effort to build a scaffolding for my research, I have spent the last few years compiling primary sources with several faculty research mentors who specialize in physical and digital archives spanning from the early American period to the late twentieth century. In order to examine the racialized corporeal markets that are driving these white queer sexual economies, I have to contend with an Antebellum rubric of pleasure and enjoyment. This portion of the historical work of my project is informed by the theoretical guidance of Saidiya Hartman. In Scenes of Subjection (1997), Hartman writes: Antebellum formations of pleasure, even those of the North, need to be considered in relation to the affective dimensions of chattel slavery since enjoyment is virtually unimaginable without recourse to the black body and the subjection of the captive, the diversions engendered by the dispossession of the enslaved, or the fantasies launched by the myriad uses of the black body. (26) In my work, I understand the conditions of pleasure and enjoyment as multifaceted expressions of mastery that seek to recreate the homoerotic possibilities of slave performance (Hartman 43). The texts that I’ve compiled in the field of history explore the erotic life of white mastery. The African American historiographies that I’ve read examine how the forced display of sexual submission, the performative gestures of white sexual ownership, and the demand placed upon the enslaved for submission to forced sexual acts are established and built into the ontology of white homoerotic desire. The field of African American History allows me to ground this charge in archival texts and historiographies through which I analyze the social (and sexual) nuances of mastery. I ground the social and affective dynamics of sexual ownership in the historicization of mastery theorized in Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul (1999). Johnson writes: These slaves, then, embodied a type of public recognition--a type of honor--that could be beaten out of their backs. In buying them, slave-holders boasted that their own mastery would inhabit their slaves’ every action. Their slaves would be extensions of themselves, the actions of the enslaved indistinguishable from the will of the enslavers. Slave breaking was a technology of the soul. Buying slaves to break them represented a fantasy of mastery embodied in the public subjugation of another or private omnipotence transmuted into public reputation. (107) The “technology” of slave-breaking as a method to underscore the extent of access to and ownership over the enslaved body not only emphasizes the present nature of the “fantasy of mastery” (Johnson 107) but is also inextricably linked to the sexual charge of racialized corporeal markets. In a psychoanalytic turn, a better understanding of the emphasis on the melding of these inner and outer worlds, or “private omnipotence transmuted into public reputation” (Johnson 107), allows for a deeper historical analysis of the sexually charged affective stakes of ownership. Stakes that, for the sake of both social and sexual economies, blur the delineations made between what it meant publicly to have complete bodily access to enslaved bodies of the same gender versus the opposite, suggesting that mastery is not devoid of homoeroticism. I invoke Vincent Woodard’s definition of homoerotic in The Delectable Negro--- “[implying] same-sex arousal and draw[ing] attention to those political, social and libidinal forces that shape desire ...” (14)---to specify and delineate a separate set of internal negotiations during the same-sex sexual abuse (or the erogenous mapping) of Black male bodies. Since enslaved Black bodies “embodied registers of the indomitability of [their owner’s] will” (Johnson 107), the sexual charge of the public displays of mastery (including ones of a homoerotic nature) is inevitably bound to the history of white queer sexual discourse. This will be the groundwork that informs my readings of the nineteenth and twentieth-century texts. Using my historical analysis as a foundation, I will be critically examining erotogenic spectacles of blackness that share aesthetic and affective components of the public displays of mastery under slavery. This section of my project looks at the social and literary evolution of homoerotic forms of white mastery through the late twentieth century. The growing presence of a more widely recognized queer literary canon and its production of affective language and sexual literacies still remain connected to an understanding of pleasure that cannot be severed from the ontological life of American chattel slavery. Thus, despite the emerging critiques of a strictly heteronormative regime within American literature, homoerotic renderings of blackness within the white literary imaginary are mined for an understanding of pleasure that is directly linked to Hartman’s notion of an economy of enjoyment (Hartman 26). In an effort to continue developing Hartman’s theory of the economies of pleasure and enjoyment, I will be interrogating these economies not as interchangeable affective establishments but as a single economy of enjoyment that, in an Althusserian sense, is deeply invested in the production of pleasure (Althusser 86). The investments that American literature makes in this economy of enjoyment allow it to monetize the pornotropic black spectacle yielding pleasurable dividends (Spillers 206). The literary investments of this economy of enjoyment and its reproduction of erotogenic black spectacles for pleasure leave a paper trail that is connected to American chattel slavery based on its defining proprietorial characteristics. Since the reproduction of erotogenic spectacles of blackness is needed to attain pleasure, this economic model can be examined over several literary periods. Additionally, tracking the queer appraisal of these erotogenic black spectacles allows me to make legible the Antebellum value attributed to pleasure within white queer sexual economies down to the present. My work seeks to make interventions in literary and cultural studies around blackness and sexuality. Additionally, the intention of this project is to also reconsider the colonial historicization of American queer life and pleasure within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.