29 min
January 13, 2023: Sex Work at the Birth of the Ghetto Kite Line
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- News
We are pleased to continue sharing a conversation between Micol Seigel and Anne Gray Fischer. Fischer’s powerful book, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification, was published in 2022, and is an account of gender and sexuality’s crucial role in the history and exercise of police power. In this conversation, Fischer and Seigel discuss the archive and research at the foundation of the book and its relationship to wider abolitionist organizing. They work through the relationship between sex work and vice policing, aimed primarily at womens’ bodies, along with race, which allowed wide swathes of Black neighborhoods to be treated as red light districts, subject to intensified police surveillance and violence. Fischer shows that vice policing was key to developing the American ghetto, as well as its devastating effects on Black people.
We are pleased to continue sharing a conversation between Micol Seigel and Anne Gray Fischer. Fischer’s powerful book, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification, was published in 2022, and is an account of gender and sexuality’s crucial role in the history and exercise of police power. In this conversation, Fischer and Seigel discuss the archive and research at the foundation of the book and its relationship to wider abolitionist organizing. They work through the relationship between sex work and vice policing, aimed primarily at womens’ bodies, along with race, which allowed wide swathes of Black neighborhoods to be treated as red light districts, subject to intensified police surveillance and violence. Fischer shows that vice policing was key to developing the American ghetto, as well as its devastating effects on Black people.
29 min