Disreputable Women Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego

Disreputable Women is a deeply transdisciplinary study of how black women use sex work and placemaking to claim economic, bodily, and sexual autonomy in a militarized city that is intent on displacing and caging them. Christina 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 reconceptualize the public and private spheres by using residential hotels and multi-use 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 who must 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 in the scene of militarization and gendered anti-blackness.