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.
Reproducing Racial Capitalism: Sexual Slavery and Islam at the Edges of Queer of Color Critique
Neda Atanasoski is professor and chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), coauthor of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and coeditor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution (2022), (the latter two with Kalindi Vora). She is currently the coeditor of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Previously, she was a professor and founding codirector of the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz.
Rana M. Jaleel is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis, where she chairs the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies and is a Dean's Faculty Fellow as well as a Chancellor's Fellow. Her work examines the politics of evidence: how concepts like labor, sex/gender, race, and property are sustained or transformed through the recognition, narration, and redress of harm. Her book, The Work of Rape (2021), received a 2021 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was cowinner of the 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. Other academic work has been published in places like Amerasia, Critical Ethnic Studies, Social Text: Periscope, Cultural Studies, Syndicate, and The Brooklyn Law Review. Dr. Jaleel is part of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal's editorial collective. A longtime member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently serves on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
Neda Atanasoski, Rana M. Jaleel; Reproducing Racial Capitalism: Sexual Slavery and Islam at the Edges of Queer of Color Critique. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 2024; 123 (1): 33–53. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10920723
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