Mastering Emotions by Erin Austin Dwyer

Author:Erin Austin Dwyer [Dwyer, Erin Austin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812253399
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Gendering Affective Discipline

Affective discipline was employed to keep enslaved people in line and to prevent them from running away, but it was also a gendered punishment, frequently engaged to threaten or punish enslaved women in order to compel sexual relations. Many slaveholders and overseers comprehended that a woman who was isolated from her parents, spouse, or children might be more vulnerable to their sexual predations.69 Not long after coming to one of her husband’s Georgia plantations, Fanny Kemble wrote about an enslaved woman she met named Judy, who recounted tales of abuse at the hands of the plantation overseer, Mr. King. After rebuffing his sexual advances King “flogged her severely” for refusing to yield, before he “sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five Pound,” a separate, remote plantation where she claimed slaves were “sometimes banished.” Judy conceded that as “bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken that again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal swamp of Five Pound.”70 Like Brown and Douglass, Judy had experienced both physical and affective discipline, and she concluded that punishments that targeted her emotions were worse to endure. Judy’s account also stresses the gendered aspects of affective discipline. As the most frequent targets of sexual harassment and assault, enslaved women were faced with two terrifying options: succumb to their owner or overseer, or face temporary or permanent exile from their loved ones.

An 1860 letter from a Maryland planter named T. D. Jones to an enslaved woman named Eliza is a harrowing example of a slaveholder selling an enslaved person as punishment rather than for profit, and it shows how this was used to affectively discipline enslaved women who resisted an owner’s desires. In the biting letter Jones wrote that he had sold Eliza away from her daughter Jennie because he believed Eliza to be “ungrateful” and untrustworthy. However, over the course of the letter he insinuated that he had actually separated Eliza from her young daughter to punish Eliza for an unspecified emotional slight that he believed she had committed. Eliza had previously written to inquire about her daughter, “expressing the hope” that her master would permit Jennie to come live with her. Eliza longed for her daughter enough to write to her former owner, but his letter was calculated to make Eliza feel the pangs of separation all the more deeply. Jones blithely announced that he had read the letter to Jennie, adding that Jennie “seemed glad to hear from … Aunt Liza … (as she calls you).” Nevertheless, he replied that Jennie herself “doesn’t want to go away from her master.” In his response the tension of their affective tug-of-war was palpable, as was his desire to inflict heartache. The slaveholder first emphasized how little Eliza meant to her daughter, noting that Eliza was no longer referred to as “mother,” but as the more cordial “Aunt Liza,” before telling Eliza that her own daughter allegedly preferred to stay with her owner rather than be reunited with her mother.

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