You are warmly invited to attend a book talk with Christina Carney, an associate professor in the Department of Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. Carney will discuss her groundbreaking monograph, Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego. In Disreputable Women, Carney examines how Black women engaged in sex work and place-making to claim economic, bodily and sexual autonomy in a militarized city intent on displacing them. Focusing on 20th-century San Diego, she reveals how these women used residential hotels and commercial spaces to sustain erotic economies and cultural lives, complicating dominant views that dismissed them as “blight.” Her framework of “disreputability” offers a powerful rethinking of the built environment, gender and Black women’s lives amid ongoing militarization and anti-Blackness.

The event's sponsors are the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program; the Africana Studies program; the Department of Sociology and Anthropology; and the Department of World Languages and Cultures.