Disreputable Women is a deeply transdisciplinary study of how black women use sex work and place making to claim economic, bodily, and sexual autonomy in a militarized city that is intent on displacing and caging them. Christina Jessica Carney distills the production of these "disreputable women" during two major twentieth-century urban development processes in downtown San Diego, where municipal police, public health officials, and even activists designated street-involved sex workers and the places they congregated as blight.
Carney documents how some black women reconceptualized the public and private spheres by using residential hotels and multiuse commercial spaces for housing and work, controlling their erotic economies and their sexual-cultural lives. She marks how discrete and explicit intellectual, economic, and political practices by black women complicate a dominant understanding of red-light areas and black sex workers as undesirable contaminators to be "cleaned out." Instead, her intuitive framework of "disreputability" offers a more ethical and workable approach to imagining the built environment and its inhabitants—developing a rich and robust grammar for understanding black women's lives amid scenes of militarization and gendered anti-blackness.
"An engaging and informative read. Christina Carney's adept and thoughtful analysis of the ways black women created lives and communities for themselves within the context of structural racism and state violence offers important contributions to black studies and black feminist studies, particularly by highlighting how these women enacted resistance."--Christina Baker, Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced
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Disreputable Women represents the very best of new scholarship in the fields of queer and black feminist history: interdisciplinary, evidence rich, and conceptually sophisticated. This book promises to be the rare text that might appeal to historians, ethnographers, literary scholars, and students and researchers alike."--Mireille Miller-Young, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
