Dialogues between Elsa Dorlin’s conceptions of self-defense and Saidiya Hartman’s “Seduction and the Artifices of Power” (2022): violence necessary for the constitution of the subjectivity of enslaved women

Abstract

This article aims to explore, based on the book “Self-defense: a philosophy of violence” (2020), by Elsa Dorlin, and the essay “Seduction and the ruses of power” (2022), by Saidiya Hartman, the category of violence as a legitimate form of defense and resistance in the American slavery context of the 19th century. In the case of black women, violence entered the field of sexuality, open to legitimized
and justified rapes, configuring a language of mutual affection between master and slave. As the main theoretical-methodological contributions, it was used Haraway’s notion of feminist objectivity and partiality of vision, in addition to the theorizations of Díaz-Benítez, Spillers, Silva and Wynter to problematize the need to politicize our own subjectivities, starting from the premise of looking at the other through a transversal and much more plural connotation. This may be a way to advance anti-
racist feminist debates from a responsible and localized perspective, extending the category of self-defense to a practice of the self, capable of allowing the exercise of
considering others.