How did issues of intimacy, like sexuality, pregnancy, coercion, and family, shaped enslaved women’s decisions to resist during slave rebellions in the Caribbean and U.S. South?
This lecture explores how reproductive autonomy, kinship, and sacred knowledge influenced enslaved women’s resistance, often overlooked in historical archives and scholarship. From ending pregnancies to escaping with children or forming maroon communities, women resisted both bondage and the exploitation of their bodies. This work-in-progress highlights how family and intimacy were central, not peripheral, to the politics of rebellion and the fight to undermine the capitalist logic of Atlantic slavery.