Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder by Jennifer L. Morgan

· racism

RI DaSēr K made me aware of this article, and Jennifer L. Morgan, and posted the following excerpts.

Jennifer L. Morgan published “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770” in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. LIV, No. 1, January 1997.

Morgan also appeared in the 2023 Netflix documentary Stamped from the Beginning.

Page 168:

“As these and other scholars have shown, male travelers to Africa and the Americas contributed to a European discourse on black womanhood. Femaleness evoked a certain element of desire, but travelers depicted black women as simultaneously un-womanly and marked by a reproductive value dependent on their sex. Writers’ recognition of black femaleness and their inability to allow black women to embody “proper” female space composed a focus for representations of racial difference. During the course of his journey, Ligon came to another view of black women. As he saw it, their breasts “hang down below their Navels, so that when they stoop at their common work of weeding, they hang almost to the ground, that at a distance you would think they had six legs.” For Ligon, their monstrous bodies symbolized their sole utility – their ability to produce both crops and other laborers.”

“Ligon’s narrative is a microcosm of a much larger ideological maneuver that juxtaposed the familiar with the unfamiliar – the beautiful woman who is also the monstrous laboring beast. As the tenacious and historically deep roots of racialist ideology become more evident, it becomes clear also that, through the rubric of monstrously “raced” Amerindian and African women, Europeans found a means to articulate shifting perceptions of themselves as religiously, culturally, and phenotypically superior to those black or brown persons they sought to define. In the discourse used to justify the slave trade, Ligon’s beautiful Negro woman was as important as her six-legged counter part. Both imaginary women marked a gendered whiteness that accompanied European expansionism.”

Page 169:

“As Ligon penned his manuscript while in debtors’ prison in 1653, he constructed a layered narrative in which the discovery of African women’s monstrosity helped to assure the work’s success. Taking the female body as a symbol of the deceptive beauty and ultimate savagery of blackness, Ligon allowed his readers to dally with him among beautiful black women, only seductively to disclose their monstrosity over the course of the narrative. Travel accounts, which had proved their popularity by the time Ligon’s ‘History . . . of Barbadoes’ appeared, relied on gendered notions of European social order to project African cultural disorder. I do not argue here that gender operated as a more profound category of difference than race. Rather, this article focuses on the way in which racialist discourse was deeply imbued with ideas about gender and sexual difference that, indeed, became manifest only in contact with each other. White men who laid the discursive groundwork on which the “theft of bodies” could be justified relied on mutually constitutive ideologies of race and gender to affirm Europe’s legitimate access to African labor.”

Page 170:

“Writers who articulated religious and moral justifications for the slave trade simultaneously grappled with the character of the female African body – a body both desirable and repulsive, available and untouchable, productive and reproductive, beautiful and black. This article argues that these meanings were inscribed well before the establish ment of England’s colonial American plantations and that the intellectual work necessary to naturalize African enslavement – that is, the development of racialist discourse – was deeply implicated by gendered notions of difference and human hierarchy.”

“Thus, writers commonly looked to sociosexual deviance to indicate savagery in Africa and the Americas and to mark difference from Europe. According to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, “in Ethiopia and in many other countries [in Africa] the folk lie all naked . . . and the women have no shame of the men.” Further, “they wed there no wives, for all the women there be common . . . and when [women] have children they may give them to what man they will that hath companied with them.”” Deviant sexual behavior reflected the breakdown of natural laws – the absence of shame, the inability to identify lines of heredity and descent. This concern with deviant sexuality, articulated almost always through descriptions of women, is a constant theme in the travel writings of early modern Europe. Explorers and travelers to the New World and Africa brought expectations of distended breasts and dangerous sexuality with them. Indeed, Columbus exemplified his reliance on the female body to articulate the colonial venture at the very outset of his voyage when he wrote that the earth was shaped like a breast with the Indies composing the nipple.’”

Page 178:

“On the West African coast, women’s bodies, like those of their New World counterparts, symbolized the shifting parameters of the colonizing venture. English writers regularly directed readers’ attention to the sexually titillating topic of African women’s physiognomy and reproductive experience. In doing so, they drew attention to the complex interstices of desire and repulsion that marked European men’s gaze on Amerindian and African women. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers conveyed a sexual grotesquerie that ultimately made African women indispensable, in that it showed the gendered ways of putting African savagery to productive use. Although titillation was certainly a component of these accounts, to write of sex was also to define and expand the boundaries of profit through productive and reproductive labor.”

Page 179:

“The symbolic weight of indigenous women’s sexual, childbearing, and child-rearing practices continued to be brought to bear on England’s literary imagination. John Lok, in his account of his 1554 voyage to Guinea, published forty years later in Hakluyt’s collection, re-inscribed Africans’ place in the human hierarchy. Borrowing verbatim from Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Peter Martyr, Lok described all Africans as “people of beastly living.” He located the proof of this in women’s behavior: among the Garamantes, women “are common: for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie.””

Page 181:

“William Towrson’s narrative of his 1555 voyage to Guinea, also published by Hakluyt, further exhibits this kind of distillation. Towrson depicted women and men as largely indistinguishable. They “goe so alike, that one cannot know a man from a woman but by their breastes, which in the most part be very foule and long, hanging downe low like the udder of a goate.” This was, perhaps, the first time an Englishman in Africa explicitly used breasts as an identifying trait of beastliness and difference. He goes on to maintain that “diverse of the women have such exceeding long breasts, that some of them wil lay the same upon the ground and lie downe by them.” Lok and Towrson represented African women’s bodies and sexual behavior so as to distinguish Africa from Europe. Towrson in particular gave readers only two analogies through which to view and understand African women – beasts and monsters.”

Page 184:

“De Marees inscribed an image of women’s reproductive identity whose influence persisted long after his original publication. “When [the child] is two or three moneths old, the mother ties the childe with a peece of cloth at her backe…. When the child crieth to sucke, the mother casteth one of her dugs backeward over her shoulder, and so the child suckes it as it hangs.”

Frontispieces for the de Marees narrative and the African narratives in de Bry approximate the over-the-shoulder breastfeeding de Marees described, thereby creating an image that could symbolize the continent (see Figures V, VI, VII). The image was a compelling one, offering in a single narrative-visual moment evidence that black women’s difference was both cultural (in this strange habit) and physical (in this strange ability). The word “dug” (which by the early 1660s was used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to mean both a woman’s breasts and an animal’s teats) connoted a brute animality that de Marees reinforced through his description of small children “lying downe in their house, like Dogges, [and] rooting in the ground like Hogges” and of “boyes and girles [that] goe starke naked as they were borne, with their privie members all open, with out any shame or civilitie.””

Pages 184 - 187:

“African women’s African-ness seemed contingent on the linkages between sexuality and a savagery that fitted them for both productive and reproductive labor. Women enslaved in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did not give birth to many children, but descriptions of African women in the Americas almost always highlighted their fecundity along with their capacity for manual labor. Seventeenth-century English medical writers, both men and women, equated breastfeeding and tending to children with work. Erroneous observations about African women’s propensity for easy birth and breastfeeding reassured colonizers that these women could easily perform hard labor in the Americas while simultaneously erecting a barrier of difference between Africa and England. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women and men anticipated pregnancy and child birth with extreme uneasiness and fear of death, but at least they knew that the experience of pain in childbirth marked women as members of a Christian community. African women entered the developing discourse of national resources via an emphasis on their mechanical and meaningless childbearing. Early on, metaphors of domestic livestock and sexually located cannibalism relied on notions of reproduction for consumption. By about the turn of the seventeenth century, as England joined in the transatlantic slave trade, assertions of African savagery began to be predicated less on con sumption via cannibalism and more on production via reproduction. African women were materialized in the context of England’s need for productivity.

Page 189:

“Abolitionists and antiabolitionists alike accepted the connections between race, animality, the legitimacy of slavery, and black women’s monstrous and fecund bodies. By the I770s, Edward Long’s History of Jamaica presented readers with African women whose savagery was total, for whom enslavement was the only means of civility. Long maintained that “an oran-outang husband would [not] be any dishonour to an Hottentot female; for what are these Hottentots?” He asserted as fact that sexual liaisons occurred between African women and apes. Nowhere did he make reference to any sort of African female shame or beauty. Rather, Long used women’s bodies and behavior to justify and promote the mass enslavement of Africans. By the time he wrote, the association of black people with beasts via African women-had been cemented: “Their women are delivered with little or no labour; they have therefore no more occasion for midwifes than the female oran-outang, or any other wild animall. . . . Thus they seem exempted from the course inflicted upon Eve and her daughters.” If African women gave birth without pain, they somehow sidestepped God’s curse upon Eve. If they were not her descendants, they were not related to Europeans and could therefore be forced to labor on England’s overseas plantations with impunity.”

Page 191:

“By the time the English made their way to the West Indies, decades of ideas and information about brown and black women predated the actual encounter. In many ways, the encounter had already taken place in parlors and reading rooms on English soil, assuring that colonists would arrive with a battery of assumptions and predispositions about race, femininity, sexuality, and civilization. Confronted with an Africa they needed to exploit, European writers turned to black women as evidence of a cultural inferiority that ultimately became encoded as racial difference. Monstrous bodies became enmeshed with savage behavior as the icon of women’s breasts became evidence of tangible barbarism. African women’s “unwomanly” behavior evoked an immutable distance between Europe and Africa on which the development of racial slavery depended.”