Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego Volume 3

ASALH Book Prize Finalist 2026, Association for the Study of African American Life and History

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.