“I think that Nat Turner, as a hero, what he did in history, is bigger than me. I think it’s bigger than all of us,” Nate Parker told Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” this month.

Mr. Parker was talking about the film he directed, wrote and starred in, “The Birth of a Nation,” and he was responding to a question about whether the public should support the recently released drama in light of reports that he was accused of sexual assault when he was an undergraduate at Penn State in 1999. Mr. Parker noted that he was acquitted and countered that even more important than his own controversy was the weight of our cinematic moment: Nat Turner, the leader of the most canonized slave rebellion in American history has finally made it to the big screen.

But the most celebrated representations of the rebellion leader, including a white abolitionist’s 19th-century essay and Mr. Parker’s film today, have all reimagined Turner’s story as one that hinges on interracial rape. And though the race of both the villain and the victim of the rape have changed over time and have been dependent on the politics and era of the author, there has also been a strange uniformity.

In all these narratives, the rapes of women, black or white, are the prime motivation for Turner’s rebellion, while the women themselves are doubly marginalized. First, they are silenced by the violations against their bodies and then again when their victimization is cast as secondary to Turner’s heroism, their voices sidelined to the plot of Turner’s realization of his own manhood in the horror of slavery.