At the Center of the Periphery: Gender, Landscape, and Architecture in 12 Years a Slave

This essay examines the spatial construction of the slave plantation in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave as a way to negotiate gender and racial hierarchies in US antebellum slave society. Through the movement (and stillness) of the film's two prominent female characters, the enslaved woman Patsey and the slave master's wife, Mrs. Epps, I consider Steve McQueen's emphasis on natural landscape and the built environment as a way to examine race, gender, labor, and slavery's unyielding acts of repetitive violence.