the projection of a “nexus of race, subjection, and spectacle,” as well as for “forms of racial and race(d) pleasure, enactments of white dominance and
power, and the reiteration and/or rearticulation of the conditions of enslavement.”�� Linking blackness to the display or spectacle of trauma upon and
mastery over the enslaved, the slave economy enacted the ritual subjection of the black body as a visual regime, one in which the holders of the gaze took voyeuristic pleasure. Historian Walter Johnson suggests that there was a pornographic element to the sexual economy of slavery. He depicts the auction block as a visual
event, where buyers became intimately involved with and aroused by “reading bodies” of slaves in the inspection process at market. Johnson writes about the story of a female slave who was brought into the “inner room” of the marketplace and, according to one witness, was then “indecently ‘ examined ’ in the presence of a dozen or fieen brutal men.”�� Although slave buyers legitimated such “examinations” as necessary to confirm the reproductive abilities of slaves expected to produce more profit-generating slaves, John-
son argues that such a claim actually “served as public cover for a much more general interest in her naked body.”�� Te rationalizations of slave buyers
were “careful stories” that masked “something everybody knew: that for white men, examining slaves, searching out hidden body parts, running hands over limbs, massaging abdomens and articulating pelvic joints, probing wounds and scars with fingers, was erotic.”�� Tis corporeal intimacy of power en-
acted on the bodies of enslaved blacks reflected a ritualistic, private eroticism at the heart of domination. Tese ritualistic examinations in the slave pen
resemble the imaginative, titillating, and consumptive practices of pornography. “Gazing, touching, stripping, and analyzing aloud,” Johnson tells us, “the buyers read the slaves’ bodies as if they were coded versions of their own imagined needs.”�� Te process of “reading bodies” at the slave market vitalizes our understanding of the deep, intimate, tactile, and scopophilic gaze
that made black female bodies legible for economic, political, and social relations. Teir blackness and femaleness served as objects upon which to animate desire and capital. Black women’s fecund, firm breasts signified their
capacity to create wealth for the plantation economy, to perform sexual labor, and to suckle the children of their owners, thereby reproducing the white
family and its inheritance through gendered labor. In addition to being sites of visual pleasure, enslaved black women’s bodies were loci for a variety of mechanisms of domination in the antebellum sexual political economy. Te exclusion of blacks from legal rights codified their
subordination through laws that ensured that “children inherited their status ��
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