“Any apprehension that I or others might feel that a study of female numbers backers, numbers runners, and bootleggers would contribute further to the dehumanizing stereotyping of blacks in the media must take into consideration the fact that racial and other forms of stereotyping exist in the face of factual evidence to the contrary. We must accept that telling this story is neither to glorify nor to suggest a universal acceptance of criminal behavior in black communities.”
— Sharon Harley, “Working for Nothing but for a Living”
— Sharon Harley, “Working for Nothing but for a Living”
In 2011, the company I worked for downsized and mandated that employees work remotely. Though this was good news to most, I didn't have stable housing. I had 11-year-old twin boys and piling up debt. Instead of job hunting for another unfulfilling low-paying job, I decided a degree was the missing piece to obtaining the future I wanted. However, I needed something that allowed me to make time for my education, cover my growing expenses, and parent my children.
Stripping was the answer: it cut my work hours drastically and could yield the same, if not more, payout. I grabbed my applications to the Borough of Manhattan Community College and a local Bronx strip club and was on my way. I did my schoolwork during the day and worked the pole by night. In two years, I was able to transfer to a prestigious university on a full scholarship.
In 2015 I moved to Massachusetts to attend Smith College, an all-women and predominantly white institution of which I'd never even heard. I knew my admission was a big deal because of people's reactions when I told them I'd been accepted.
"You're going to Smith!?”
Sure, I Googled it, but somehow I missed the immensity of my admission. While no one from the University explicitly shamed me about my lifestyle, in an attempt to be seen and regarded as "respectable," I quit stripping and deleted parts of my online presence that exposed my sex worker side. I thought I had to hide a substantial part of who I was because I was turning over a new leaf. I decided to put that part of me in my past and move forward. But attending their annual Convocation stirred something up inside me—something I didn't see coming.
A Convocation is an annual event the campus hosts in which students and faculty members alike celebrate the academic year the night before the first day of classes. It's an incredibly carnivalesque evening, complete with bouncy houses and rides. The evening begins with an auditorium meeting where professors, advisors, and the university President stand on stage, donned in their best university regalia, addressing the half-naked students who populate the seats. That's right: most of the student body bore nothing but pasties and thongs. I was in disbelief for the next couple of hours. I witnessed the young women as they displayed their right to celebrate their scantily-clad bodies in a carefree and shameless way.
Had I been overthinking it? Would it really be ok to share my sex work background in this open and seemingly-safe space? Immediately I knew that it was different for me, but it would be a while before I figured out why. For the next couple of years, I kept my head down and kept working. I didn’t make it that far, just to make it that far!
In Christina Sharpe's book, In The Wake, she talks about movement within the Black diaspora in constant search of better opportunities, a "new world." The same was true of me. In the same way folks moved from the South to the North, or the Caribbean to the states, I wanted better for myself and my kids as well. In short, what made it different for me was the precarity of my future and my small margin of error compared to the white girls.
Sharpe also discusses the ripples of slavery existing in every corner of Black life today and the still-unfolding aftermaths of the Atlantic chattel slavery. In what she calls "the wake," Black lives are “swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery,” the past that really isn't the past, continuously reappearing.
As Black people, we never truly owned our bodies. Through the processes of what literary theorist Hortense Spillers terms "pornotroping," Europeans habitually reduced Black bodies to mere flesh, stripped of personhood and available for violent and sexual impulses. Even before the full development of the slave trade, Europeans perceived Blackness as uncivilized and animalistic. The women, specifically, were expected to be very easy and respond enthusiastically to any sexual advances. The myth of the Jezebel asserted that Black women had primal sexual urges and even invited white men to their beds.
Black women's bodies were imbued with a double sense of profitability, linked to their capacity for forced manual labor as well as their labor in reproducing chattel. As feminist scholar Adrienne Davis remarks, the institution of slavery became a robust "sexual political economy" that depended on Black women to supply future enslaved people. Because Black women were property and viewed as infinitely promiscuous, they were legally unrapable.
Despite the formal demise of the slavery institution, the Jezebel trope lived on. Working as domestic live-ins in the North and South, Black women were regularly exposed to sexual violence. They were also the targets of mob violence. However, as Black feminist literature scholar Hazel Carby argues, the lynching of Black men remains the most publicly acknowledged form of violation under Jim Crow.
From the 1880s into the twentieth century, media, academic discourses, and pseudoscientific reports constructed Black women as sexually deviant and inferior. In an attempt to contest these representations during 1900-1920, Black Women formed a women's movement in the Black Baptist church known as the Woman's Convention, as historian Evelyn Higginbotham documents. Although the efforts of these women enabled their churches to offer a host of social welfare services and counter racist images and structures, they simultaneously emphasized manners and morals that reflected and reinforced the hegemonic values of white America.
This discourse of respectability inadvertently ignored and disclosed class and status differentiation and does not consider the need for underground economies and its subsequent creations of aggressively enterprising women. Often faced with the near impossibility of making a decent living wage due to racist and sexist hierarchical structures, ambitious Black women turned to the illegal underground economy and resorted to criminal activities, such as sex work, to support themselves and their families.
Nonconforming Black women's behavior threatened the virtue of subordinate women in urban settings for respectable middle- and working-class Blacks, and many feared that this behavior would be the basis for how the entire race would be judged. Contemporary Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins argues that what she terms "controlling images" is meant to focus on and perpetuate negative stereotypical representations and images of Black women. Collins asserts that Black women must perform outside of visual registers to craft and circulate “positive self-definitions” of Black womanhood.
Scholars like Jennifer Nash push against the rigid lens of visual performance as toxic and considers how racial imageries can create a space of agency and even pleasure for Black female subjects. Similarly, in A Taste of Brown Sugar, Mireille Miller-Young challenges long-held assumptions about and representations of Black women in pornography. Miller does not deny that the porn industry subdues the agency of Black women; instead, she explores the possibility that women did not solely submit to stereotypical roles. She asserts that black porn actresses have historically made—and continue to make— choices within oppressive constraints, motivated by socioeconomic considerations and professional aspirations.
Like many informal labor positions, Black women used what they had to get what they wanted by establishing whatever agency they could in an oppressive structure. The choice to explore the sexual economy and other forms of informal labor also radically disrupts and challenges the limits of conventional and acceptable behavior that society expects of Black women due to uplift/respectability politics.
But regardless of whether jobs were formal or informal, options for Black women were limited. Although many today agree that traditional sexual ethics are outdated, sex work has always been highly frowned upon. Still, white women who do sex work get more opportunities and privileges such as higher pay, more respect, and protection from the law and violence than Black women do. As reflected in media, such as popular films like Pretty Woman, this racial hierarchy ties back to the slavery institute and the idea that Black people do not own their bodies or sexuality and that whiteness is more valuable than blackness. Black cis & trans women continue to face higher levels of criminalization and violence.
My experience wasn't singular but, as Saidiya Hartman calls it, an "autobiographical example" of a collective history. What started as a personal story became a window onto social and historical processes. My project, which asserts under no uncertain terms that sex work is work, spends time conversing with Black women on the sex work spectrum using self-determined terms to describe their respective occupations, ranging from webcam girl to prostitute. Black sex workers exist at the intersection of multiple prejudices— a nexus of discrimination that portrays them as dirty, debased, and dangerous, which figures them as supposedly dragging down Black women (who are not sex workers) and sex workers (who are not Black). We discuss their experiences in the trade, both positive and negative, and how they’ve had to navigate their worlds and defend their choices. Through the eyes of Black female-identifying sex workers, activists, and historians, Being Jezebel explores the challenges and triumphs of Black sex workers in the face of the deep-rooted racism and stigma shaped by American history and legislation.