Seminar:
Sexual Abuse of Black Men Under American Slavery

Prof. Thomas A. Foster
Professor, History, DePaul University, Chicago, IL

23 March 2016 (Wednesday)
4:30pm - 6:00pm
Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

This paper focuses on the sexual abuse and exploitation of enslaved men in America. I am in the process of expanding into a book my published article, "Sexual Abuse of Black Men Under American Slavery," (Journal of the History of Sexuality). This talk will give an overview of this book project and raise the problems of interpretation and analysis of historical sources for the study of rape and sexual coercion and exploitation of enslaved men. In particular, for this topic, one confronts an archive that did not legally or culturally articulate rape and sexual assault with regards to enslaved men. Studying the sexual exploitation of enslaved men, contributes to the scholarship on gender and sexuality in early America, to our understanding of slavery and slave life, to literature on black masculinity, and also to literature examining historicisation of rape.

Thomas A. Foster is Professor of History at DePaul University in Chicago, USA. His teaching and research focuses on sexuality and gender in early America. He is the author of Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Temple 2014) and Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Beacon 2006), and editor of Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (NYU 2007), New Men: Manliness in Early America (NYU 2011), Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America (Chicago 2012), and Women in Early America (NYU Feb 2015). He is currently working on a book about sexual exploitation and abuse of enslaved men.