
Suspect Relations
Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina
Kirsten Fischer(Author)
Cornell University Press
Published on 15. December 2001
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-0-8014-8679-1 (ISBN)
Description
Over the course of the eighteenth century, race came to seem as corporeal as sex. Kirsten Fischer has mined unpublished court records and travel literature from colonial North Carolina to reveal how early notions of racial difference were shaped by illicit sexual relationships and the sanctions imposed on those who conducted them. Fischer shows how the personal-and yet often very public-sexual lives of Native American, African American, and European American women and men contributed to the new racial order in this developing slave society. Liaisons between European men and native women, among white and black servants, and between servants and masters, as well as sexual slander among whites and acts of sexualized violence against slaves, were debated, denied, and recorded in the courtrooms of colonial North Carolina. Indentured servants, slaves, Cherokee and Catawba women, and other members of less privileged groups sometimes resisted colonial norms, making sexual choices that irritated neighbors, juries, and magistrates and resulted in legal penalties and other acts of retribution. The sexual practices of ordinary people vividly bring to light the little-known but significant ways in which notions of racial difference were alternately contested and affirmed before the American Revolution.Fischer makes an innovative contribution to the history of race, class, and gender in early America by uncovering a detailed record of illicit sexual exchanges in colonial North Carolina and showing how acts of resistance to sexual rules complicated ideas about inherent racial difference.
Reviews / Votes
Beginning with a sketch of Anglican (English) ideas of race and sex in the seventeenth century and the ways that North Carolina women were perceived as disrupting society, Fischer subsequently discusses cross-cultural sex, regulation of sexuality (especially of servants), defamation suits, and violence (including rape).- Joan R. Gundersen (Journal of Southern History) With this book, Kirsten Fischer joins scholars who have demonstrated the interconnection of race and gender in the evolving social hierarchy of the early South.... Because she skillfully weaves together questions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and the social order, her book should be read by scholars of all related fields.
- C. Dallett Hemphill, Ursinus College (The Journal of American History)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Ithaca
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 155 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8014-8679-1 (9780801486791)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Kirsten Fischer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.
Content
Introduction: Changing Conceptions of Race1. Disorderly Women and the Struggle for Authority2. Cross-Cultural Sex in Native North Carolina3. The Sexual Regulation of Servant Women and Subcultures of Resistance4. White Reputations "Blacken'd & Made Loose"5. Sexualized Violence and the Embodiment of RaceEpilogueNotesIndex