IYARIC

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022): Disruption and Surveillance
Articles

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

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Collin Xia
York University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25071/2816-8275.8

Published 2022-09-30

How to Cite

Xia, C. (2022). The womb: a site of domination and resistance in the Pre-emancipation British Caribbean. IYARIC, 1(1), 28–32. https://doi.org/10.25071/2816-8275.8

Abstract

Beginning in the 1780s, British Caribbean plantocracies faced the looming threat of slave trade abolition which would end the flow of enslaved African labour to Caribbean plantation colonies. An enslaved woman's function as the source of blackness and legal slave status made their wombs essential to a future without readily available slave imports. Narratives centring the intensifying colonial domination of enslaved women's reproductive labour in slave-breeding programs to 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.

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