Brown Bag: Black Sex Economies and Placemaking in a US Bordertown

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 intent on displacing and caging them.

Christina J. Carney (she/her) is an associate professor of Black (queer) sexuality studies at the University of Missouri Columbia documents how some Black women reconceptualized the public and private spheres, using residential hotels and multiuse commercial spaces for housing and work, controlling their erotic economies and their sexual-cultural lives.

Carney is the author of Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego (2025). Her research interests include Black feminism, sex work and sex economies, urban studies, and the African diaspora.

Our Brown Bag series repeats every Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. These talks are catered, free, and open to all.