Christina Carney
Christina Carney
EDUCATION
2016 Ph.D. Ethnic Studies, University of California at San Diego
2011 B.A. Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
TEACHING & RESEARCH
As a scholar, Carney's thinking is guided by a strong commitment to advancing the intersectional and interdisciplinary study of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and culture through research, teaching, and service. Her areas of research specialization include black feminisms, black sexualities, sex work studies, queer of color critique, US West studies. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation), University of Missouri Research Board, and US Fulbright Scholars Program.
My book forthcoming book, Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego, is a deeply transdisciplinary study of how black women use sex work and placemaking to claim economic, bodily, and sexual autonomy in a militarized city that is intent on displacing and caging them. I distill the production of these "disreputable women" during two major twentieth-century urban development processes in downtown San Diego, where municipal police, public health officials, and even activists designated street-involved sex workers and the places they congregated as blight. I document how some black women reconceptualize the public and private spheres by using residential hotels and multi-use commercial spaces for housing and work, controlling their erotic economies and their sexual-cultural lives. I mark how discrete and explicit intellectual, economic, and political practices by black women complicate a dominant understanding of red-light areas and black sex workers as undesirable contaminators who must be "cleaned out." Instead, my intuitive framework of "disreputability" offers a more ethical and workable approach to imagining the built environment and its inhabitants—developing a rich and robust grammar for understanding black women's lives in the scene of militarization and gendered anti-blackness.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
CLASSES TAUGHT
Undergraduate
Gender and Identity: Understanding Intersectionality
Historical Studies of Black Women
Black Sexual Politics
Introduction to Black Studies
Mixed Level Courses (Advanced Undergraduate and Graduate)
Black Feminism: Past and Present