Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South by David Stefan Doddington (review)

Gendered studies of slavery in the antebellum American South have been prolific in recent years. It all started with the publication of Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), which placed the life cycle, labor, and family of enslaved women at the center of historical examination. White’s work triggered a wave of research into the lives of enslaved women, examining their gendered world, and demonstrating the ways they attempted to resist their enslavement and restore their femininity. Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004) is a notable example. More recently, historians have been building on the achievements of these studies of enslaved women and have turned their attention to the study of enslaved men and issues of masculinity. For example, my own work, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (2016), was inspired by the advances made by the likes of Deborah Gray White and Stephanie Camp and seeks to shed light on the gendered world of enslaved men, exploring how they fought the emasculating effects of slavery and forged bonds of solidarity and friendship with one another.

David Doddington’s Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South enriches our understanding of antebellum slave masculinity further, studying how enslaved men competed and fought with one another to construct gendered hierarchies through which they negotiated their masculine identities. His study highlights the importance of internal divisions, comparisons, contest, and conflict in framing issues of slave masculinity. His rationale is clear: by emphasizing a collective response to enslavement and emasculation, “we risk neglecting the diversity of interactions in the American South and underestimating the divisions that developed in slave communities” (9).

Doddington starts his analysis by examining the discourse of “resistant manhood.” This was the idea, made popular by abolitionists in the nineteenth century and championed by the likes of Frederick Douglass, that heroic slave resistance—most notably rebellion—was a key manifestation of slave masculinity. To be a man meant physically fighting the oppressor. Doddington underscores that this discourse was formulated through comparison with other men in slave communities; contemporaries, such as David Walker in his 1829 Appeal, sometimes belittled, shamed, or mocked those slaves who did not resist heroically in order to strengthen their own claims to heroism and push for more militant action against slavery. Doddington’s point is that this discourse was hierarchical—those who failed to resist had their masculinity questioned.

The book then examines how enslaved men constructed masculine identities through work. Some enslaved men articulated their masculinity through work for the slaveholder, such as those who held trustee roles as overseers on the plantation. As a result of these positions of authority, these enslaved men exercised dominance—sometimes violence—over other slaves and enjoyed material benefits associated with the role, including, for example, being able to provide extra food and clothing for their families. In this way, they forged a competitive masculine identity that did not directly rebel against the system of slavery but instead upheld it. Trustee positions created divisions in slave communities, and so did the informal economies that enslaved men took part in across the antebellum South. Enslaved men who worked on small patches of land, hunted, traded, and performed extra work subscribed to an individualistic model of manhood, celebrating qualities of industry, energy, respectability, and skill. Success depended on these qualities and resulted in competitive hierarchies, whereby less successful men were sometimes considered lazy, dependent and lacking drive and therefore less masculine.

Doddington also shows how some enslaved men “perceived intimate relations as competitive encounters in which to prove dominance over others” (142). These encounters often involved violence and caused considerable tension in slave communities across the South. Doddington examines court records, documenting cases of rape, beatings, and murder, to show how some men articulated their masculinity through sexual dominance and violence. Finally, he considers how enslaved...