Agency Within the Medical Plantation
Science and societal norms have long situated the white cishet male perspective as the objective, unmarked lens: white cishet malehood is allowed to be considered unbiased and to produce knowledge that is labeled as unbiased when, in fact, this position is no more objective and unbiased than any other. (Collins) This, in turn, has created scientific knowledge that is situated as unbiased that is deeply rooted in racism, sexism, and other forms of structural oppression. This scientific oppression takes a variety of forms, from phrenology, the pseudoscientific and racist notion that you could discern personality and societal value from the shape of someone’s skull, to violence against marginalized folks often for the purpose of creating knowledge that ultimately disenfranchises them. One example of this is the violence enacted against black enslaved women by James Marion Sims, known as the “father of modern gynecology.”
Under the institution of slavery, enslaved black women were often forced into frequent childbirth to continue the institution of slavery, often through sexual violence enacted on them. This creates the image of black women as a site of commodity production, in which black enslaved folks are the commodity and black women are both commodity and an important force in the production of this commodity, though not by their choice. (Dudley) The white, patriarchal, capitalist machine refused to see black enslaved women as people, and rather saw them as vessels for production of commodity. Hortense Spillers describes this as the difference between being “flesh” and being “body” — Spillers employs this critical difference by explaining that black women are only seen as being “flesh,” not fully human and, as a result, able to be exploited and commodified, and not “body,” meaning not associated with notions of humanity and personhood. Because black enslaved women’s bodies were seen as commodity, the harm that was done to them by repeated childbirth that often happened through sexual violence was ignored and, in fact, often fetishized by the white gaze.
This commodification is what normalized the medical appropriation of black enslaved bodies for purported medical progress. James Marion Sims and his work in gynecology is a particularly potent example of this. Sims exploited the bodies of enslaved black women under the guise of what Marie Jenkins Schwartz has deemed the “medical plantation” — a place where medical practices are defined by what slaveholders need and want. The medical plantation saw black enslaved women as flesh and commodity, and as a result refused to acknowledge their pain and only performed medicine on them for the purpose of making them again able to produce commodity and further the institution of slavery. The medical plantation was also an important way in which white slaveholders surveilled enslaved black folks. Surveillance of enslaved black bodies by white slaveholders was integral to the institution of slavery because it made visible the construction of white supremacy. This is to say, surveillance allowed white slaveholders to enact control over black enslaved folks, allowing for the perpetuation of a system that commodified blackness and dehumanized black folks. (Browne)
Surveillance on the plantation created a certain kind of theatricality around the imagery of slavery, and specifically within the medical plantation the operating table became a theater for the performance of violence under the guise of medicine. Sims’s operating table was a site of violence and also a site of white pleasure at violence against black folks. Violence against enslaved black folks reaffirmed for white slaveholders that black folks were disembodied commodity, flesh that they could act upon freely. (Richardson)
Much of the medical record associated with Sims’s work treats the black enslaved woman as complicit, as disembodied flesh participating at the will of white slaveholders. However, we can read against the archive here to understand that while black enslaved women are often either left out of the archive or written in as having no agency, they were incredibly intelligent people who had the ability to make informed choices about what they did. When we so frequently read about black enslaved women as being objectified, it is easy to forget that even within a limited set of choices they were still intelligent humans making choices that were often in favor of their own safety. Black women’s perceived compliance in slavery and the violent medical acts that often came with it can be read as compliance for the purpose of advocating for themselves in the way that they could within the medical plantation and the institution of slavery, and thus as a mode of personal freedom and agency in an institution that sought to take that away. (Ivy)
