| Following the Civil War, a number of terrorist organizations were founded in the states of the former Confederacy with the express aim of reversing the progressive gains of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Among the methods employed by these groups, of which the Ku Klux Klan was merely the most notorious, especially striking was their pervasively sexualized character. This dissertation approaches klan sexual violence—including whipping, rape, lynching, genital torture and mutilation—both as a singular response to prevailing conditions and as part of a longer historical trajectory in which sex has been deployed as an instrument of terror in order to traumatize a subjugated population and thereby forestall the attainment of legally-mandated equality. Assailing freedpeople and their allies on the basis of ascribed sexual, social, or political transgressions, nightriders were from the start adroit manipulators of terrorism's logic, mortifying the flesh and spirit in a manner calculated to deny victims' humanity, thwarting the realization of individual and collective aspirations, and in the process shackling African Americans to a status that was strikingly reminiscent of bondage. “Bondage” here resounds at once in socioeconomic position and sexual sadism, for klansmen drew freely on the antebellum eroticization of slavery to inflict violence as sex. As it has in more familiar contexts, late-twentieth-century Bosnia in particular, sexual violence systematically applied proved a remarkably efficient means of achieving its intended result: in this instance, the reenshrinement of white male supremacy.; With the klans essentially functioning as a law unto themselves, such legal measures as were undertaken were woefully ineffectual in combating terror. Decades passed before the ramifications of sexual traumatization would become the subject of sustained medical and scientific inquiry, and decades more before the law began to cognize explicit claims for their redress. Much as the trauma of slavery affected those well beyond its immediate grasp, a fact central to contemporary demands for slave reparations, the consequences of sexualized terrorism have persisted, contributing in subtle yet significant ways to the perpetuation of racial hierarchy. This study seeks to underscore the profound costs of sexual trauma to its proximate victims as well as to their descendants who may stand at a significant temporal, geographic, and imaginative remove, and to urge recognition of the disparate forms that such violence has in the past assumed so that future outbreaks might be more readily contained. |
