Author Meets Critics - Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable brings together scholars to discuss, Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego, a recently published University of California Press book. The author, Christina Carney will be joined by Yen Espiritu (California, San Diego), Eva Payne (Mississippi), Marlon Bailey (Washington University, St. Louis), and Jeffrey McCune (Rochester), who will all give comments and pose questions for the audience and author.

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.ns to the audience.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Christina Carney, University of Missouri-Columbia

Comments

• Jeffrey McCune, University of Rochester

• Marlon M Bailey, Washington University in St Louis

• Eva Payne, University of Mississippi

• Mireille Miller-Young, University of California-Santa Barbara

Biographical Information

As a scholar, my thinking is guided by a strong commitment to advancing the intersectional and interdisciplinary study of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and culture through research, teaching, and service with areas of research specialization including black feminisms and global black sexualities along with sex work, critical trafficking and carceral studies. My work has been supported by the University of Missouri Research Board, Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation), and US Fulbright Scholars Program. While my first book examined how the sexual policing of Black women sex workers was foundational to the city of San Diego’s development as a center of tourism and the military, my current project takes a more global and transhistorical approach by examining how African heritage tourism in Brazil engenders new sex economies and forms of relationality in the African Diaspora.