Examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. Establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.
Focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Uses extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities.