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Anti-respectability as method takes the form of what Christina Sharpe calls "undisciplining"—a process by which scholars develop new approaches, methods, and modes of inquiry that productively challenge disciplinary biases.1 The work of scholars including LaMonda Horton-Stallings and Marlon Bailey indexes the importance of employing Black queer feminist methodologies to examine critical queer geographies forged through a resistance to concretized space as central to community and vestiges of colonial capitalist anti-Black racial/sexual terror and the deauthorization of racial biological epistemes that overdetermine kinship practices, Black death, and pleasure.2 Our respective projects center Black transgender women in Chicago and Black cisgender queer and lesbian women in Atlanta, and consider how vulnerable Black queer women deploy strategies of self-investment and find pleasure while participating in sexual economies and navigating respectability within these critical queer geographies.3
Black Queer Women's "Erotic Sovereignty": Sex Work and Self-Investment
Addressing respectability's influence when writing about sex work among Black transgender women remains inevitable, as it shapes popular (mis)conceptions of the reasons these individuals engage in this specific work. Scholars routinely frame transwomen's engagement in sex work as a consequence of social marginalization.4 The underlying assumption is that trans women seldom choose to do sex work and would not engage if they had equitable access to social institutions such as health care, employment, and public accommodations (public restrooms, restaurants, businesses, etc.). Respectability undergirds such an assumption by denigrating sex work as an illegitimate work form to which no self-respecting Black woman would aspire. Further, respectability's appeal to hegemonic notions of decorum and propriety necessarily casts sex work as incapable of enhancing racial uplift or facilitating socioeconomic ascension. Deauthorizing respectability promotes understanding how sex work exists as a form of self-investment and pleasure among Black trans women in an anti-respectable manner.
My ethnographic data suggest Black trans women in Chicago's ballroom scene5 engage in sex work by mobilizing their embodied knowledge6 in order to earn a high income (tax free), set their own hours and the terms of their services, and establish/maintain a community of clients and transfemme sex work colleagues. Tethering Black trans women's sex work to survival narratives obfuscates their capacity to be agential operatives in navigating exclusion and violence rather than passive victims of numerous...