Possession and the Hyphenated Slave

Posted by Tanos on Tue 17 Feb 09, 12:43 AM to the Internal Enslavement blog

Tags: enslavement, masterslave

What does "slave" mean? Is there only one type of slave? Is possession the same as ownership?

The Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of slave is "one who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another person, whether by capture, purchase, or birth; a servant completely divested of freedom and personal rights". This definition makes it clear that a slave is essentially someone's property, and without any rights.

Internal Enslavement, and Total Power Exchange before it, has described what ownership looks like in consensual Master/slave relationships, where ownership and lack of rights are the outcome of a state of mind. This state corresponds to the OED's literal definition, and sometimes the term "literal slave" is used.

When we're talking about historical and modern non-consensual slavery, literal slaves were often called "chattel slaves" since they could also be sold like other "goods and chattels". Chattel slaves have all the features of property, but some types of unfree people only have some of its features. There's a whole list of these different types of "hyphenated slaves".

Debt-slaves are forced to work to pay off their creditor. Slave-labourers do physical work under some kind of compulsion, maybe in chains. The Victorians replaced transportation to Australia with hard labour or "penal servitude" - Latin for "punishment slavery". Mediterranean countries condemned convicts to row ships as "galley slaves", but then released them once their sentence was served. And in the 19th century, newspapers and politicians worried about women trafficked across borders and imprisoned in brothels for prostitution, and called it the "white-slave trade".

In an attempt to stop the slave trade and hyphenated states like debt-slavery, many nations signed the 1926 Slavery Convention, and this used the broad definition "Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised."

This raises the question, "What powers make up the right of ownership?" In fact, ownership itself is often described as a "bundle of rights". For example: the rights to control, to use, and to sell. Chattel slaves have all the aspects of ownership, but the other "hyphenated" types have only some or even one. Really, those types brought in by the 1926 Convention's use of "any" are about possession rather than outright ownership.

Previously, I've always used the word "possession" as another word for "ownership" when talking about Master/slave and Internal Enslavement relationships, but I now think this is a useful distinction to make.

Much of the law surrounding property has been developed for land. In English law, one can establish possession of unclaimed land and then legally defend it against other people unless someone who can prove ownership comes along. If you can maintain undisputed possession for long enough (currently 12 years), you can then claim full ownership of the land.

It strikes me that TPE and Internal Enslavement seek to establish ownership via a long enough period of possession, so that it sinks into the slave's psyche and becomes undisputed. We might make it clear that these are literal slaves by saying "owned slaves", in the same way "chattel slave" spells out the right to sell of some historical slaves.

"Owned slave" has been slightly controversial as a term in M/s, with people asking what else is a slave but owned? But as we've seen, there are many types of hyphenated slave, not all of which are owned. Indeed, "unowned slave" is often used by unattached M/s people who feel a strong desire to be owned. Again, isn't this a contradiction? But then isn't "freed slave" too?

Maybe we should instead say "unclaimed slaves", just as we talk about unclaimed property: it's still property, we just don't know who it should belong to, yet.

But I think this use of "possession" can be carried further. There are many situations where dominants are "in possession" of submissives, without owning them. Where the possession only lasts as long as the dominant is present. In fact, we can imagine a continuum of possession from captivity and other types of physically controlling bondage, through that magical open-mouthed obedience that submissives can fall into in a dominant's presence, to 24/7 relationships where the dominant is always in change, on to IE where a slave has internalised ownership.

These other forms of possession do have some of the rights that make up ownership. Maybe they're types of hyphenated-slave too, somehow?

Edited Tue 17 Feb 09, 12:53 AM by Tanos