Abstract
City planners, urban renewal advocates, and gentrifiers hate sex—especially when it is commercial, non-heteropatriarchal, involves Black bodies, or is interracial. In San Diego, during the early twentieth century, to make way for the military-industrial complex and tourism, officials and local reformers sought to eliminate so-called blight. To do so, politicians and law enforcement set their sights on sex workers, especially Black women, whom they called disreputable. Carceral efforts to expunge sex workers, dance halls, and other sites for interracial sex were part of a broader effort to criminalize, de-house, and displace Black women and other human representations of broken windows in the service of economic growth, urban development, and upholding the white supremacist racial order.
Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego is a gift to community and urban sociologists, as well as to anyone studying the development of communities and city life and the surveillance systems and carceral systems that sustain them. Critically, Christina Jessica Carney showcases the fact that sexuality, sex work histories, and their policing are a critical yet often neglected aspect of city development. In excavating these overlooked Black and sexual histories in San Diego, Carney demonstrates the utility of scholars adopting the framework of disreputability to examine the contributions and lives of marginalized people who have played unappreciated roles in breathing life into great American cities.
Disreputable Women presents readers with a previously untold history of San Diego through the lens of sex-working Black women in “disreputable zones” who helped shape and remake the city. Black women created innovative ways to evade surveillance and incarceration in San Diego’s militarized metropolis, which over time became home to significant numbers of military bases, industries, and families. Carney convincingly demonstrates that these local economies were sites of sex, power, inequity, survival, resistance, pleasure, gender play, interracial play, Black creativity and joy, and kinship and community.
Disreputable Women provides a masterclass to all sociologists interested in innovative and transdisciplinary methods. Following a queer studies approach, Carney demonstrates the benefits of what Jack Halberstam called scavenger methodology—an approach that brings together methods often seen as antagonistic, and that “refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence” (1998:13). In Disreputable Women, Carney weaves together archival methods, autoethnography, ethnography, interviews, and literary analysis, producing a mosaic of data that show how politicians, law enforcement agents, white first-wave feminists, and church leaders cast migrant Black sex workers as “disreputable” and, in turn, how “the disreputable black female subject was made, preserved, and contested” (p. 5).
Carney’s conceptualization of disreputability takes Black feminist theorizing of refusal to new heights. Carney joins a growing chorus of Black feminist scholars who, rather than centering Black women in U.S. history who have championed respectability politics as a political tool, focus on “wayward Black women” (Hartman 2019), who unapologetically harness the “Black ratchet imagination” (Stallings 2013) and engage in a “politics of perversion” (Cruz 2016) to challenge systems of oppression, build community, and experience pleasure. Carney writes, “I use the disreputable, a black feminist framework, to attend to the historical, political, economic, and epistemic shifts of black women’s sex work and reproductive labor in twentieth-century San Diego,” arguing that “disreputability is a place-based act of refusal” (pp. 5–6). Disreputability, Carney posits, is a “method of being that confounds state agents and discourses of respectability” (p. 19). Thus, Carney’s case study presents a fresh and new history of the power manifesting in rejection of respectability politics, showcasing refusal as “a form of activism and practice of freedom” (p. 7). Through refusal, people whom the state and its policing forces call disreputable become agents of social change and contribute to the development of economic and cultural life in cities.
Across the book’s chapters, Carney demonstrates how Black women forged sexual economies rooted in a reclamation of disreputability, anti-respectability politics, and a refusal to be displaced, discarded, and shamed, and how such a fierce, unapologetic politics forged communities and spaces in which these women and their co-conspirators could not only survive, but thrive. Each chapter is a cartographer’s dream, offering maps of local sexual economies in San Diego. Applying intersectionality with precision, Carney is attentive to the classed, raced, and gendered structure of these libidinal economies and the Black sex working women who shaped them.
In Chapter One, Carney maps the geographies of local Black and interracial sex work economies in San Diego at the turn of the twentieth century, charting a network of Black residential hotels and vice districts. Black women established businesses and rooming houses that became the bedrock of sex worker communities, and they ingeniously used privacy laws to protect them. In Chapter Two, Carney maps the area of Logan Heights, “a hotbed of black social life and commerce,” that at the time of World War II underwent significant changes due to rezoning, highway development, and militarized urban renewal (p. 83). It was also an area that was home to Maya Angelou during her days as a brothel worker and manager of two Black lesbian sex workers. Long before she was attending and performing at a presidential inauguration, and writing Hallmark cards, she was a disreputable woman who used “disreputability as a resource, creating opportunities to advance her career as a sex worker to one of America’s most celebrated cultural producers and figures” (p. 109).
In Chapter Three, Carney maps the downtown vice district, a racially segregated gayborhood and a sexual economy developing in response to urban development, and the work of gay and safe space activists who supported the criminalization and displacement of disreputable Black gender-nonconforming sex workers. Nevertheless, through conversations with Bubba, the chapter’s primary interlocutor, a Black transfeminine sex worker and drag performer, readers also get a glimpse into how disreputable people built and forged long-standing communities that were the source of care, reciprocity, mutual aid, and pleasure. In Chapter Four, Carney maps the sexual economy and commercial areas catering to lesbian and queer women’s nightlife in the 1980s through the early 2010s. This backdrop sets the stage for Carney’s analysis of Black lesbian activism and place-making in a locale riddled with anti-Blackness and persistent de facto racial segregation.
Disreputable Women has so much to offer to sociologists working across a wide range of sociological subfields, such as Community and Urban Sociology; Crime, Law, and Deviance; Economic Sociology; Family and Kinship; Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility; Labor and Work; LGBTQ Studies; Race and Ethnic Studies; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. This book serves as a reminder of the groundbreaking contributions that sociologists in these fields can make when they embrace transdisciplinary methods and center disreputability. Marginalized people are not mere victims under the weight of suffocating systems of power—they are people who resist, reclaim, contest, and remake space, advance and build communities, and create spaces for pleasure in the face of all the adversity the world endlessly throws at them.