16:00 - 17:30
Room: Muirhead – Room 121
Stream: Slavery and Marriage in African Societies
Chair/s:
Marco Gardini
Embodied Subjugation: Comparative Status in Slavery and Marriage
Alice Bullard
Bullard Law, Washington DC

This paper draws on aggregate data and case studies from more than a decade’s work in West African (in particular, Mauritanian) slavery and human rights (including women’s rights). This paper considers the implications of the truism that embodied subjugation subtends the status of wife and slave. Legal reform— whether national or international statutory changes that penalize slavery or afford increased rights to women— touches upon embodied subjugation only tangentially. Thus, this paper demonstrates how sexual enslavement exists outside of a legal context that allows slavery. The global prevalence of assault, harassment and other subjugating tactics, testifies to the widespread endurance of embodied female subordination. Using case studies from the early 21st century, this paper explores the phenomenology of such subordination as well as processes of emerging from embodied subordination.

Debates about trafficking and contemporary slavery treat law as a matter of national statutes and international treaty law. Grassroots level analysis includes as well customary authority as exerted by local notables, such as imams, marabouts, and traditional ruling elites. The axes of analysis are usually communal solidarity versus liberal individualization, and economic empowerment (or, whatever economic security can be obtained) versus defense of rights. Thus tradition v. (Western) modernity, and materialist analysis (whether Marxian or otherwise) versus the enforcement of legal rights, orient the debates on what constitutes enslavement, what differentiates slave from wife, and what policy responses or reforms might address the phenomenon. Representative of this scholarship is Julia O’Connell Davidson’s, Modern Slavery; The Margins of Freedom, (Palgrave McMillan 2015) and Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Modern Trafficking, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). For criticism of human rights law see, for example, Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism, (Chicago U.P. 2016). This paper aims to shed new light on the slavery debates by focusing on embodied gendered subordination and a psycho-analytic understanding of law. This paper builds upon my previous work, such as “Neither Melancholic nor Abject: A Lebou (West African) Inspiration for Feminine Empowerment,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Vol. 16 (Jan. 2015) 63-81, and “La crypte and other pseudo-analytic concepts in French West African psychiatry,” in Unconscious Dominions, ed. by Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard Keller (Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 43-74. This paper’s perspective recognizes that treaty law and statutory legal reforms leave intact entrenched religious and deep psychological tendencies to subordinate and disempower (in other words, to enslave) women. Thus even in showcase “liberal” states in which legal equality is established, religious and personal subordination remains prevalent. Religious law and masculine authority (patriarchal law) remain operative. The phenomenon of sexual enslavement can occur despite legal equality. Within this psycho-analytic perspective, we consider the detailed processes of obtaining independence from embodied subordination.

Except in the instance of public records (chiefly court records) the data in this paper is render anonymous to protect privacy. Data is sourced from U.N. studies, from international human rights organizations, and from autobiographical accounts.

About the Author:

Alice Bullard earned her masters and doctoral degree in intellectual history from the University of California at Berkeley with Martin Jay as her doctoral adviser. She held a Fulbright Scholarship for doctoral research in Paris. Prior to that she earned her bachelors degree with honors at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland, and then studied for a year in Germany as a DAAD scholar. She worked as a history professor for about a decade, earning tenure and establishing the Human Rights Initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. She continued on to earn a juris doctorate from Georgetown University Law in Washington D.C. in 2012. She currently works as a human rights lawyer with a focus on contemporary slavery, women’s rights, and environmental justice. She is co-chair of the Environment Committee of the National Lawyer’s Guild. Bullard’s publications include Exile to Paradise, (Stanford University Press, 2000); Human Rights in Crisis, (Ashgate Press, 2008); Emotional Latitudes: The Ambiguities of Colonial and Post-Colonial Sentiment, co-edited with Matt Matsuda, special issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, 34:1 (Spring 2008); Mauritania Look 2014, (IRA - USA E-Book, 2014); and numerous essays on francophone postcolonial history, transcultural psychiatry and the Lacanian équipe at the Fann Hospital in Dakar Senegal, and slavery in Mauritania. Many of her essays are available on-line via academia.edu.


Reference:
Tu-A39 Slavery 2-P-001
Presenter/s:
Alice Bullard
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Muirhead – Room 121
Chair/s:
Marco Gardini
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
16:00 - 16:15
Session times:
16:00 - 17:30