Over the course of the eighteenth century, race came to seem as corporeal as sex. Kirsten Fischer has mined unpublished court records and travel literature from colonial North Carolina to reveal how early notions of racial difference were shaped by illicit sexual relationships and the sanctions imposed on those who conducted them. Fischer shows how the personal-and yet often very public-sexual lives of Native American, African American, and European American women and men contributed to the new racial order in this developing slave society.

Liaisons between European men and native women, among white and black servants, and between servants and masters, as well as sexual slander among whites and acts of sexualized violence against slaves, were debated, denied, and recorded in the courtrooms of colonial North Carolina. Indentured servants, slaves, Cherokee and Catawba women, and other members of less privileged groups sometimes resisted colonial norms, making sexual choices that irritated neighbors, juries, and magistrates and resulted in legal penalties and other acts of retribution. The sexual practices of ordinary people vividly bring to light the little-known but significant ways in which notions of racial difference were alternately contested and affirmed before the American Revolution.

Fischer makes an innovative contribution to the history of race, class, and gender in early America by uncovering a detailed record of illicit sexual exchanges in colonial North Carolina and showing how acts of resistance to sexual rules complicated ideas about inherent racial difference.

About the Author

Kirsten Fischer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

Reviews

Beginning with a sketch of Anglican (English) ideas of race and sex in the seventeenth century and the ways that North Carolina women were perceived as disrupting society, Fischer subsequently discusses cross-cultural sex, regulation of sexuality (especially of servants), defamation suits, and violence (including rape).

-- Joan R. Gundersen * Journal of Southern History *

With this book, Kirsten Fischer joins scholars who have demonstrated the interconnection of race and gender in the evolving social hierarchy of the early South.... Because she skillfully weaves together questions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and the social order, her book should be read by scholars of all related fields.

-- C. Dallett Hemphill, Ursinus College * The Journal of American History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780801486791
Author Kirsten Fischer
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g