Neuter-Bound/Neuter-Freed: Queer Gender and Resistance to Slavery

This article highlights moments in William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that feature black women using masculine performance, and black men using their own (knowledge of) same-gender desires, for the purposes of black liberation. Focusing on these moments broadens our understandings of queer gender during slavery, seeing queerness not solely as an imposition that some enslaved people strategically redirected toward liberation, but also as a potentially self-determined orientation leading to pleasure and play in addition to liberation.