Jezebel by another name : Black women, carceral geography, and the practice of urban marronage in Chicago

“Jezebel By Another Name: Black Women, Carceral Geography, and the Practice of Urban Marronage in Chicago,” examines how Black women (including Black/Afro Latinas), femmes, and non-men in Chicago navigate the carceral, anti-black landscape created by neoliberal approaches to “law and order.” Recognizing that there are multiple sites where Black women are most vulnerable in the city, this project focuses specifically on sex work and community organizing. I argue that there is a dialectic between these two spaces, as spaces of violence and spaces of radical possibility. As such, this dissertation examines Black spatial practices of performance, art, politics, and community healing as contemporary forms of marronage in the afterlife of slavery, which I term urban marronage. Incorporating an interdisciplinary use of Black feminist geography and Black feminist ethnographic methodologies, this dissertation knits together the stories of Black women who have been violated by the state and Black women organizing against state violence on the West and South Sides of Chicago. I chronicle how these women are hyper-policed, criminalized, and territorially bound by racialized, gendered, and sexualized discourses of citizenship. This includes an analysis of anti-sex work ordinances and Black women’s precarity. City laws limit the possibilities of Black women’s citizenship by limiting their rights to the city (freedom of movement, access to public space), “criminalizing” all Black women as potential sex workers, and marking Black women as violable (not only by the police but also by society generally). To counter this criminalization, Black women create spaces to celebrate, support and empower Black communities as a form of urban marronage: a Black, queer, feminist, anti-violence organizing practice of creative imagining and refuge-building. Black women are criminalized and queered by the state regardless of their personal histories, class differences, and societal positions. Consequently, a Black queer feminist organizing praxis is necessary for diagnosing and addressing the landscape of gendered, antiblack violence.