The Commodification of the Black Female Body

Abstract

The legal institution of chattel slavery has demonstrated commodity fetishization of the Black female body. White Englishmen have, throughout history, utilized Marx’s doctrine to codify the existence of African American women as sexual property for their pleasure. Furthermore, commodity fetishism explains the racism and white superiority that white Englishmen were able to uphold over their enslaved counterparts. African American women were vulnerable to dehumanization, sexual exploitation, premature violence, and rape. Slavery was intended to systematically oppress African American females in appropriating blackness through the transformation of enslaved African American women into forms of capital, which has become an ideological foundation in slave regimes. As these regimes further developed, the commodification of African American females has increased.