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

There is, perhaps, no better-known account of hard-won masculinity among enslaved men in the antebellum South than Frederick Douglass’s recounting of his fight with so-called slave breaker Edward Covey. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” Douglass wrote in his first autobiography (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave [Boston, 1845], pp. 65–66). After an intense two-hour physical confrontation, Douglass bested Covey and emerged transformed by his victory—he was “made a man.”

While Douglass’s illustration of his own manhood was undoubtedly one powerful example of masculinity as performed by an enslaved man, David Stefan Doddington offers insight into other, often competing, conceptions of enslaved men’s masculinities. In Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South, Doddington argues that historians have been too quick to assume that enslaved communities had a singular approach to resisting enslavers’ attempts to emasculate enslaved men. Instead, Doddington draws our attention to fractures within enslaved communities and to hierarchies based on class, sex, and status. Through his exploration of multiple sites of masculine performance, including resistance and fugitivity, trusteeship and authority, work and providership, sexual violence and virility, and violence and leisure, Doddington argues that enslaved communities did not hold a monolithic ideal of masculinity. Rather, he shows that enslaved men performed many forms of masculinity and often confronted and contested other enslaved men who did not conform to their particular notion of appropriate masculine behavior. Overall, the book makes excellent use of close readings of texts written by formerly enslaved people, as well as the Works Progress Administration narratives from the New Deal era, to illustrate how enslaved people thought about masculinity and performed it. The latter sources, in particular, allow Doddington to incorporate formerly enslaved women’s voices into his discussion of masculinity.

Further, Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South troubles the agency-resistance dichotomy that has loomed over scholarship about enslaved people’s lives. While the first chapter of the text offers a familiar argument about the centrality of the image of heroic fugitives from slavery in abolitionist discourse (for example, Douglass), the remainder of the book complicates this story by articulating other ways enslaved men performed masculinity. Instead of equating masculinity with resistance, Doddington has found compelling evidence that enslaved men in positions of authority—overseers or drivers—articulated a rival masculinity centered on negotiation and occasionally collaboration with enslavers. In the case of Josiah Henson, for example, it sometimes involved prohibiting other enslaved people from escaping. Another chapter explores enslaved family life and shows how some enslaved men tacked their sense of masculinity to familial obligation through the work they performed and their economic responsibilities, as well as the protection they provided.

In one of the crucial insights of the book, Doddington explores how for some enslaved men notions of what it meant to be a man were quite different. Some articulations of masculinity, he argues, were violent, particularly toward other enslaved people. In an important chapter on sex and power, Doddington argues that sexual dominance—including sexual violence—was also a site of constructing one form of masculinity. Sexual pressures, threats of rape, and homicide cases clearly illustrate the brutal reality of the effects of this masculinity for enslaved women. In this section of the text, Doddington is effective in showing that categories of difference—explicitly sex—continued to matter in enslaved communities.

In sum, Doddington offers new insight that provides a complex understanding of the messiness of masculinity. His examination opens a window into how enslaved men made lives for themselves and their families, and it uncovers a history of masculinity that does not always map easily onto stories of heroism.