Defining Concubinage seeks to go even further, redefining ‘concubinage’ and ‘concubine’ as analytical tools that help us gain a deeper understanding of the processes of gender, hereditary racial slavery, and White male supremacy in the making of the modern world. Radically, it breaks from the slavery/freedom binary and Catholic definition of concubinage to start afresh. Instead, it uses 'asymmetrical dependency' to examine a spectrum of female experiences of agency, negotiation, coercion, and abuse under concubinage beyond women's direct involvement in slavery, domestic, and sexual relations.

This broader conceptual framing of asymmetry in dependencies has significance for rethinking historical slaveries and our approach to contemporary concubinage as one of the most urgent global issues of gendered modern slavery in the Global South – a task well under way. The first of three dedicated conference gatherings of international scholars exploring these questions was held at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in May 2025, and from which a journal special issue will be published next year. Crucially, this project is pioneering a paradigm shift in how future non-Eurocentric histories of women and slavery can be written.