“Sellin’ your own body”: Contextualizing racialized gender violence and illicit sexual practice

Darlene Clark Hine’s 1989 essay “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West” provides a regionally specific alternative accounting of black migration patterns that helps to make visible the specific vulnerabilities attendant to black women’s lives and establishes a framework for contextualizing black women’s various forms of sexual agency. This essay discusses the significance of Hine’s essential contribution in light of subsequent work on black women’s experiences of racialized gender violence.