The Sexual Scene of Slavery: Notes on Black (Male) Subjectivity and Toni Morrison's Beloved

Dr. Darieck Scott

This talk is a close reading of a scene from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), in which the character Paul D is sexually humiliated as a chain-gang prisoner by white guards. In the novel, Paul D's unsuccessful effort to suppress the memory of his sexual exploitation occasions a productive reconsideration of the trope of emasculation and suggests the insufficiency of "manhood" as the symbol of black liberation. Toni Morrison broaches a taboo subject — the sexual subordination of black men as slaves. The effect of this inquiry is that it takes two well-worn tropes in our general understanding of the depredations of slavery —"emasculation of black men" and "rape of black women" — and combines them, suggesting that one method of emasculation is the rape of black men by white men. In revealing this heretofore unspeakable possibility (just as the novel as a whole attempts to represent the unspeakable and elusive trauma of the Middle Passage), the text points toward a refashioned vision of "blackness," tied neither to a particular concept of sexuality nor to phallocentric ideologies of manhood and gender roles.

Dr. Scott is an assistant professor of English with an emphasis in African-American literature, fiction writing, lesbian/gay and queer studies.