UC San Diego

Hidden in Plain View is a study of the history of sexuality as it emerges from the institution of slavery in the United States and its transnational circuits. In order to situate the place of slavery in queer studies, I trace diverse sexual encounters within antebellum society, such as master-slave sexual acts, same-sex desire, alternative kinships, and cross-dressing, as they are encoded within a wide variety of sources, including sensational fiction, visual satires, and periodicals. My study requires a composite archive to enrich our account of the sexual landscape of the early nineteenth century, before the advent of the culturally defining and legally limiting terms of miscegenation, heterosexual, and homosexual. The sources that I gather in Hidden in Plain View depict how interracial desire is reworked in the literary and cultural imagination as a homoerotic space of same-sex affiliation. The arc of the project works through complex scenes of interracial and same-sex sexual affiliations within and tangential to the institution of slavery. These literary, archival, and historical accounts of sexual display do not reveal a triumphant insight into the queer past, and as such, they remain "hidden in plain view" within the sexual record of the institution of slavery. From Victor Séjour's transatlantic short story of the fraught love of a slave for his master in pre- revolutionary Haiti (1837), to the German immigrant Ludwig von Reizenstein's sensational fiction of revolutionary lesbian desire and interracial romance in New Orleans (1855), I connect the sphere of the erotic with the shifting political and social boundaries of race and sexuality. The archival research I provide on E.W. Clay, for example, reveals his visual satires (1830s) as mocking abolitionist politics not just through deriding heterosexual interracial desire, but through depicting same-sex desire as part and parcel of interraciality. These joint histories insist that the sexualized racism of slavery is an indelible part of how queerness is constituted today, despite its excision from current queer neoliberal politics. Hidden in Plain View thus shores up a narrative of the interracial, same-sex intimacies of people often deemed undesirable