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As Hortense Spillers has written, the genteel system of southern patrimony was bluntly waived when it came to the rape of enslaved Black women by white slave owners, who could effectively produce new assets — that is, new enslaved people — in the form of their own disavowed children. Gender alone cannot explain such an arrangement; it cannot speak to how sex functions as a kind of material base, as the Marxist feminists might put it: a source of labor, wealth, and power from which the elaborate superstructure of gender continually emerges, breaks off, and reforms in unintended ways.