Naturalizing Affection: Family, Slavery, and the State in the Antebellum South

• In Event: Politics of Intimacy: Race, Family and the Neoliberal State

Abstract

The paper analyzes the political intersectionality of race and family in the antebellum South (1830-1860), demonstrating how the courts in an ongoing and everyday way upheld the regime of slavery through the construction of racialized family policy standards - naturalizing a standard of domestic affection, on the one hand, to evaluate claims within the white household and, on the other, assessing black family relations (free and enslaved) solely through a second, economic standard of market utility and price. The paper thus uses the historical case of slavery to theorize the way state action institutionalizes family practices through racialized standards, that serve as both the doorway to liberal equality for some families as well as the wall by which to shut out others.

Author

• Gwendoline M. Alphonso, Fairfield University