Rethinking Rufus

Reviewed by: Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men by Thomas A. Foster Sarah N. Roth (bio) Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men. By Thomas A. Foster. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. 192. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $22.95.) In Rethinking Rufus, Thomas A. Foster offers the kind of transformative contribution to our understanding of American slavery that comes along once in a generation. Foster takes on the important and woefully understudied topic of the sexual objectification, exploitation, and violation of enslaved men. His book further illuminates the horrific nature of the American slave system and adds to our sense of what it meant to be a man within the bonds of slavery for those who lived that experience. Rethinking Rufus creates a more complete picture of American slavery by exploring the lives and worldviews of enslaved men as men, thus far a rare approach in the literature on slavery. Up to this point, the few historians interested in the masculinity of African American bondsmen have embraced the scholarly trend of emphasizing resistance and resilience on the part of enslaved people, even in the face of their overwhelming oppression. In Rethinking Rufus, Foster touches on this theme but primarily stresses how the severe constraints inherent in the system gave unfree black men little chance to fulfill the aspirations they had of manly independence and autonomy in their romantic lives. “Most, if not all” enslaved men, Foster writes, “experienced the type of sexual violations that devalued and objectified the men, underscoring their status as enslaved men” (9). [End Page 404] This victimization rested in part on contemporary conceptions of black men’s physicality. Foster creatively and effectively uses Western art alongside more conventional historical sources to illustrate how whites “fixated on black male bodies with both desire and horror” (30). The objectification of black men in this manner helped justify the sexual exploitation that occurred when enslaved men were under whites’ control. Because masters sought to maximize profits through the reproduction of their labor force, they regarded the sexuality of black men as a commodity to be controlled and exploited for monetary gain. Relying heavily on federal Works Progress Administration interviews conducted in the 1930s, Foster identifies abundant evidence that slaveholders attempted to manipulate reproduction through forced coupling. Foster argues that this interference in the intimate lives of enslaved people led to trauma for both men and women. He disputes the idea that black men facing this situation should be viewed as “collaborators in the subordination and the sexual abuse of enslaved women” (3, quoting Sasha Turner). Instead, Foster posits that along with the women, “the men were violated, as their bodies were used to violate the bodies of others” (64). Rethinking Rufus also uncovers instances of direct sexual abuse committed by male slaveholders against enslaved men. Although few incidents were explicitly noted in contemporary accounts of slavery, Foster adroitly reads the silences in nineteenth-century slave narratives to make a convincing case that such violations were endemic to the system. Foster’s further contention that valets were especially vulnerable to sexual abuse by their masters seems logical, given the close and constant interactions that characterized those relationships. Such is the nature of the sources, however, that with the exception of one compelling story from Harriet Jacobs’s narrative, the evidence Foster provides for sexual exploitation as a facet of the valet-master relationship is more suggestive than definitive. Foster encounters similar difficulties with evidence to support his conclusion about the sexual abuse of enslaved men by slaveholding women. He asserts that “intimacy between white women and enslaved men” should be “recognized as stemming from the sexual vulnerability of enslaved men and white women’s expression of power and dominance” (69). While this statement may indeed be valid, Foster includes a limited number of documented instances in which slaveholding women had a sexual relationship with, or sexually violated in some way, an enslaved male. Most of the examples he cites involved sexual contact between nonslaveholding white women and black men—many of whom were free or of unknown status. In such a relationship, the power dynamic would have differed considerably from that which existed between an enslaved man

Autonomy · Masculinity · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Romance · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology