This article tracks contemporary debates surrounding human trafficking, sex slavery, and the slave trade, in which the specter of the Ottoman empire and its system of slavery—as well as other “Oriental” slave systems—emerge as templates for imagining the place of sex in slavery. At the same time, the authors highlight how Ottoman and “Oriental” slavery is largely considered irrelevant to the genealogy of present‐day racial capitalism. By contrast, the authors argue that considering historically parallel and entangled slave systems is important not just to accounts of modern‐day slavery but also for how we conceptualize the “racial” in racial capitalism and the “queer” and “of color” in queer of color critique. Building on Black feminist historiography on the transatlantic slave trade, the commitments of queer of color critique, and contemporary research concerning sexual violation and racial capitalism, the authors explore how interconnected struggles across the globe are partitioned by imagined frameworks of racial and sexual difference that isolate entangled systems of gendered and sexual enslavement.

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