1. What kinds of questions about slavery and southern society can the study of slave concubinage help us answer?
2. What does the practice of slave concubinage tell us about the gendered nature of the slave experience?
3. Which enslaved women were most likely to become concubines? Why? What patterns are apparent in concubinage practices? In addition to their sexual labor for their owners, what sorts of work did they typically do?
4. How did slaveowners and other white men justify their claims to sexual access to enslaved women? In what ways did white women respond to concubine relationships? Why?
5. How did former slaves perceive concubine relationships? How did the women in such relationships respond to them?
6. Why did some enslaved women enter into concubinage relationships without being physically coerced?
7. How were concubines perceived and treated by other slaves? How were the children of such relationships treated?

3

1. Concubines were young women who met the beauty standards of the time.

1. What is Lussana’s overall argument in this essay? What are his key sources of evidence about the lives of male slaves?
2. What benefits could arranged slave fights bring to their owners? To the slave participants? In what sense could such fights not only exploit but ‘liberate’ male slaves, and serve as a source of empowerment?
3. What are the ‘three slave bodies’ identified by Stephanie Camp? What was the “reclaimed body”? In what way were male slave fighters reclaiming their bodies?
4. Why, according to Lussana, was it significant that slave fights were public events? What insights does he derive from anthropologist David Gilmour?
5. In what ways could enslaved fighters offer “direct resistance” (914) to white oppression? In what sense was the slave body potentially a “political entity” (915)?
6. Why were slaveowners opposed to slave-organized bouts? What functions did such contests serve among the slaves themselves? What insights does Lussana derive from anthropologist Sigrid Paul? How did slave fights cement community bonds among slaves?