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“Queens of the Earth” with Women to Serve Them: White Freedom and Enslaved Black Labor in Flora Tristan's Feminist Imagination
Abstract. Slavery—not simply as an analogy for gendered domination, but as a concrete institution of racial exploitation—shaped how renowned socialist feminist Flora Tristan envisioned freedom for white women. This article focuses on Pérégrinations d'une paria, Tristan's monumental memoir of her 1833–1834 journey from Paris to Peru via Bordeaux, Cape Verde, and Chile. This voyage brought Tristan into sustained contact with the slave trade and chattel slavery, primarily in locales outside the purview of formal French colonial rule. Pérégrinations thus offers an opportunity to examine how not only imperial but also global forms of racial violence influenced French feminist understandings of sexed and gendered freedom in the 1800s. Despite Tristan's formal commitment to abolitionism, in Peru she not only utilized the enslaved labor of Black and Indigenous people but also elaborated a vision of white female liberation that was directly dependent on that labor. Her articulation in Pérégrinations of what it would mean for white women like herself to be truly free—an articulation focused on mobility, corporeal autonomy, and circulation in urban space—presupposed their dominion over the bodies of men and, especially, women of color.
