Survival by any Means Necessary: TGNC labor during the War on Drugs

• In Event: Racialized Transmisogyny, Necropolitics, and New Methodologies for Survival

Abstract

This paper centers a racial capitalist framework to make legible trans of color history during the War on Drugs in New York. Weaving together oral histories with municipal records, it offers new histories of labor in the informal economy that broach forms of survival and resistance. Informed by Black trans studies scholars, it critically examines the demonization of the racialized “transvestite prostitute” in the aftermath of deindustrialization and argues that trans and gender nonconforming people of color formed a highly visible segment of the class of urban, nonwhite drug users targeted by the War on Drugs. It specifically focuses on the post-1977 period, when the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration helped subsidize local efforts to transform Midtown Manhattan into a corporate and tourist haven by criminalizing informal economies and closing down businesses that catered to the sex industry. These efforts ended the era of the “peep shows” that many trans women of color remember fondly, for these establishments offered a measure of protection by separating the consumer and worker by a screen. By focusing on a range of feminine-spectrum and masculine-spectrum grassroots people in the informal economy, this paper shows how trans and gender nonconforming Black and Brown working-class people recast the trans movement into a capacious “anticaptivity project” focused on economic, carceral, and intimate violence.

Author

• Daniela I Valdes, Princeton University