Hortense Spillers considers the aftermath of the notion of partus sequitur ventrem-the “American ‘innovation’ that proclaimed that the child born of an enslaved mother would also be enslaved.” In “Shades of Intimacy: Women in the Time of Revolution,” she deepens this ongoing exploration by engaging the idea of the “shadow” family as one of the tectonic shifts in the concept and practice of social relations in the New World from the 18th century forward. Watch Spillers’ critical examination of this period of profound contradiction and change when dangerously hegemonic definitions of race, gender, and family took hold.