“There Is NO Justice in Louisiana”: Crimes against Nature and the Spirit of Black Feminist Resistance

Abstract

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the leaders of the quarter-century-old Women With A Vision (WWAV) collective launched a coordinated campaign to expose and challenge the criminalization of Black cisgender and transgender women working in New Orleans’ street-based economies. For the simple act of trading sex for money to survive, hundreds were convicted of a felony-level Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) and forced to register as sex offenders for periods of fifteen years to life. After five years of organizing, WWAV successfully overturned the statute, thereby securing the removal of more than 800 people from the Louisiana sex offender registry list. This article brings a fine-grained analysis to WWAV’s process of organizing against CANS in order to trace the making of this criminalization crisis and to clarify the terrain of the organization’s victory. It argues that WWAV organized through a distinct southern Black feminist tradition in order to disrupt the use of CANS as a technology of post-Katrina predatory policing. By refusing their erasure from the city of their birth, WWAV staff and participants not only rendered visible the mundane terror of targeted criminalization against Black women; they also opened new horizons for Black feminist struggle and collective liberation.

Keywords:

• Black feminism
• criminalization
• Hurricane Katrina
• New Orleans
• predatory policing
• resistance
• sex work

Notes

Statement made by one of the first WWAV participants to be forcibly placed on the sex offender registry because of CANS.

Audrey Doe, et al. v. Bobby Jindal, et al., “Order and Reasons,” 29.

See also Women With A Vision, “OUR WIN—Letter from Executive Director Deon Haywood,” March 30, 2012, http://wwav-no.org/our-win-letter-from-executive-director-deon-haywood (accessed March 1, 2017).

Much of this organizational archive, which included interviews and testimonies completed with women charged with CANS, as well as meeting notes, outreach materials, and flyers, was destroyed in the May 2012 aggravated arson attack on WWAV’s offices. The quotes that are included in this article were largely drawn from the few electronic records and public presentations that survived the attack.

Louisiana earned the title “the world’s prison capital” because it incarcerated more people, per capita, than any other U.S. state. First in the U.S. means first in the world. Cindy Chang, Scott Threlkeld, and Ryan Smith, “Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World’s Prison Capital—8-Part Series,” Times Picayune, May 13–20, 2012, http://www.nola.com/prisons/ (accessed March 1, 2017).

See Cindi Katz, “Bad Elements: Katrina and the Scoured Landscape of Social Reproduction,” Gender, Place and Culture 15, no. 1 (2008): 15–29; Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, edited by McKittrick and Woods (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007), 1–13; and Jordan T. Camp, “‘We Know This Place’: Neoliberal Racial Regimes and the Katrina Circumstance,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 693–717.

See Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1–9; and Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38–45.

Some of the first research on the statute and its history was conducted by interns working at WWAV and the organization’s partners at Voice Of The Ex-offender (VOTE), where longtime WWAV board member Rosana Cruz was on staff. This research was expanded and systematized in conversation with the campaign’s legal team, Andrea J. Ritchie, Esq., the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic and Center for Social Justice at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. Together with WWAV, they co-published the policy brief, “Just a Talking Crime”: A Policy Brief in Support of the Repeal of Louisiana’s Solicitation of a Crime Against Nature (SCAN) Statute. After the CANS victory, CCR built an online archive of the Crime Against Nature by Solicitation litigation, which includes a case timeline with links to the Doe v. Jindal complaint and the amicus brief filed in support of plaintiffs: http://www.ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/crimes-against-nature-solicitation-cans-litigation (accessed March 1, 2017). Additionally, attorneys Alexis Agathocleous and Andrea Ritchie published analyses of the case through Loyola University. See Agathocleous, “When Power Yields to Justice: Doe v. Jindal and the Campaign to Dismantle Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature Statute,” Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law 14, no. 2 (2013): 331–54; and Ritchie, “Crimes Against Nature: Challenging Criminalization of Queerness and Black Women’s Sexuality,” Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law 14, no. 2 (2013): 355–74. Also see Agathocleous, “Building a Movement for Justice: Doe v. Jindal and the Campaign against Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature Statute,” in The War on Sex, edited by David M. Halperin and Trecor Hoppe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

Louisiana Acts chap. I, § 2. LA. REV. STAT. § 788.

Sylvester Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Acts of the State of Louisiana 1896, page 102, § 1, Act 69.

State v. Long, 133 La. 580 (1913).

Maurice J. Naquin, Jr., “Criminal Law—Miscegenation—Definition of ‘Cohabitation,’” Louisiana Law Review 19, no. 3 (1959): 700–05.

La. Crim. Stat. Ann. § 43:89 (1943).

In the CANS campaign archive, attention was paid to the revision of the Crime Against Nature statute text in 1942, but not to the discussion of solicitation, nor to the legislature’s decision that solicitation did not constitute a “Crime Against Nature.” I uncovered this detail in the course of my research on sex in the Louisiana criminal code.

Dale E. Bennett, “The Louisiana Criminal Code: A Comparison with Prior Louisiana Criminal Law,” Louisiana Law Review 5, no. 1 (1942): 44 (emphasis mine).

The NO Justice Project narrated the expansion of the Crime Against Nature statute to include Solicitation through a focus on the criminalization of homosexuality in the second half of the twentieth century. It did not center the role of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) in advocating for the adoption of the Solicitation clause in 1942 and again in 1982. I uncovered this detail in the course of my research on State of Louisiana v. Michael Smith, “Majority Opinion,” http://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/usa/louisiana/lasmith01.htm (accessed March 1, 2017).

See Melinda Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slut Walk (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), especially chapter 4.

Cited in Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 85.

Georgia Attorney General Gary Bowers bolstered the state’s role in managing the country’s mounting fears when he appealed the Bowers v. Hardwick criminal sodomy case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, insisting, “the law would help reduce the spread of AIDS.” Cited in Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite, 104 (emphasis mine).

For a concise history of sex offender laws and registration, see Karen J. Terry and Alissa R Ackerman, “A Brief History of Major Sex Offender Laws,” in Sex Offender Laws: Failed Policies, New Directions, edited by Richard G. Wright (New York: Springer Publishing Company, LLC, 2015). The WWAV fact sheet on the NO Justice Project was named “Just A Talking Crime” for this reason.

My attention to the everyday is informed by Saidiya Hartman’s work in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), most especially her focus on the mundane over the spectacle: “By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle” (4). I also draw on Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), especially chapter 4.

Louisiana State Sex Offender and Child Predator Registry. Cited in “Just a Talking Crime.”

United States Department of Justice, Investigation of the New Orleans Police Department, Civil Rights Division, 2011, http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/nopd_report.pdf (accessed September 1, 2014).

WWAV maintained an active log of all participants who spoke with staff informally about their CANS convictions or filled out formal NO Justice surveys on the circumstances of their convictions and the issues they were dealing with subsequently. All of the interview and survey files were destroyed in the aggravated arson attack. The logs, however, had been stored off-site in a binder of NO Justice Project materials, so they survived the fire.

Each of these components of sex offender registration had become standardized and tracked with the federal passage of the Adam Walsh Act in 2006. Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, 42 U.S.C. § 16901 et sEq. (2006).

Quoted in “Just A Talking Crime.”

Ibid.

Interview, Zina Mitchell, August 2013.

See Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012), especially chapter 5.

WWAV emerged on the national stage for combating the criminalization of street-based sex work after Hurricane Katrina. Criminalization, however, has only been one site for producing this post-Katrina fiction of Black womanhood. Education activist Ashana Bigard testified on July 18, 2015, at Breaking the Silence: A New Orleans Townhall Hearing on Women of Color: “To buy into the narrative of the [charter school] experiment, you need to buy into the idea that Black women are complicit in the under-education of Black children.” To emphasize the leadership of women of color in correcting these fictions, Alisa Bierria, Mayaba Lieventhal, and other members of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence document the issues and analysis of women of color after Hurricane Katrina to ensure that any community plan for rebuilding had a gender analysis and a demand for community accountability in “To Render Ourselves Visible: Women of Color Organizing and Hurricane Katrina,” in What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation, edited by South End Press Collective (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007).

I understand this Black feminist hermeneutic in the tradition of the Combahee River Collective focus on “interlocking” oppressions and of the framework of “intersectionality” later coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, Art. 8 (1989): 139–67, and further developed in “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99. See also Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004); Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–74; and Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (Summer 1987): 65–81.

What the NO Justice Project described is how race and gender intersect in Black women’s lives and through historically changing systems of power to at times render state and interpersonal violence against Black women wholly invisible, and at other times mark Black women’s movement as a hyper-visible threat to be disciplined.

Hortense J. Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 78.

I use “mass incarceration” in quotes here to not only signal its specificity as a term initially intended to name the dramatic expansion of the carceral state since the 1970s, but also how this term introduced a sense that the problem with incarceration was simply the “mass,” not the incarceration. Here, I follow the work of Black feminist abolitionists on prisons and racial capitalism, most especially Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007); and Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003). Editors Deborah E. McDowell, Claudrena N. Harold, and Juan Battle provide essential historical, political, economic, and sociocultural roots of “mass incarceration” in their collected work, The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010) remains the most popular and widely disseminated text on how “mass incarceration” and post-prison restrictions created a racial caste in America.

Foundational texts in studies on the intersections of race, gender, and criminalization during Jim Crow include Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). For examinations of this intersection in Black women’s worlds in turn-of-the-century northern cities, see Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) and Cheryl Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

In northern cities, Black people were also incarcerated at disparate rates, though rates would not reach Jim Crow-era racial disparities until the explosion of incarceration in the 1980s under the auspices of the war on drugs. Still, in Illinois between 1890 and 1930, African American women averaged only 2.4 percent of the state’s female population, but represented two-thirds of the daily population at Joliet women’s prison. See L. Mara Dodge, “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind”: A Study of Women, Crime and Prisons, 1835–2000 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 72–73, 84.

Victoria Law, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (Oakland: PM Press, 2009), 161–62.

Sarah Haley, “‘Like I Was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia,” in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 39, no. 1 (2013): 55–56.

Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 457.

“Maternalism” is a scholarly category through which historians have traced white middle class and elite women’s extension of their domestic practices of care, nurturing, and morality into public works. See Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (1990), 1079; and Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

To quote historian Mary Ellen Curtin, “The image of the fallen woman in the South had everything to do with race. Black women prisoners were seen as inherently immoral, while white women prisoners convicted of sex crimes lost their racial privilege.” See Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and their World: Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2000), 114–15. See also LaKisha Michelle Simmons, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), especially chapter 5.

See Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman, especially part II on: “Urban Reform and Criminal Justice.”

Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 739.

Carby poses the following questions to clarify this point: “If a black woman can claim her freedom and migrate to an urban environment, what is to keep her from negotiating her own path through its streets? What are the consequences of the female self-determination evident in such a journey for the establishment of a socially acceptable moral order that denies the boundaries of respectable sexual relations? What, indeed, is to be the framework of discipline and strategies of policing that can contain and limit black female sexuality? These are the grounds of contestation in which black women became the primary targets for the moral panic about urban immorality” (248).

Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body,” 739–40.

As noted above, the interviews and surveys that WWAV staff and founders completed with participants on the everyday impacts of a CANS conviction were among the materials destroyed in the aggravated arson attack on WWAV. Some of these quotes have been salvaged through pictures that were taken of testimonies for WWAV’s community outreach presentations. This WWAV member was quoted in CCR, “Just A Talking Crime.”

United States Department of Justice, “Fact Sheet: Department of Justice Law Enforcement Efforts in New Orleans, Louisiana,” August 21, 2006, http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2006/August/06_opa_564.html (accessed March 1, 2017). The DOJ is not responsible for NOPD arrest practices. However, I do think it is worth pondering why a local judicial system became the self-evident institution for investing federal rebuilding dollars in the wake of a catastrophic hurricane. This issue has been substantively engaged within the body of post-Katrina literature. See especially the 2009 Special Issue of American Quarterly edited by Clyde Woods, “In the Wake of Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions.”

The timing of Hurricane Katrina and post-storm United States Marshals Service intervention coincided with the passage of the Adam Walsh Act (AWA) in June of 2006, which established three tiers for sex offender registration and retroactive penalties for people who had failed to register previously. To build a uniform system of registrant classification, AWA also triggered the reclassification of thousands of people who had previously been classified as low-risk into higher-risk categories, thereby expanding the duration and severity of sex offender surveillance. See Andrew J. Harris, Christopher Lobanov-Rostovsky, and Jill S. Levenson, “Widening the Net: The Effects of Transitioning to the Adam Walsh Act’s Federally Mandated Sex Offender Classification System,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 37, no. 5 (2010): 503–19. On January 1, 2008, the same year WWAV saw a surge in participants being placed on the sex offender registry, Louisiana legislature amended the state’s existing sex offender registration laws to bring them into conformity with the provisions of the AWA. The amendments mandated that a central registry of sex offenders be maintained by the Bureau. The Bureau is also mandated to participate in the National Sex Offender Registry.

Louisiana State Sex Offender and Child Predator Registry. Cited in “Just a Talking Crime.”

Gary Rivlin, “A Mogul Who Would Rebuild New Orleans,” New York Times, September 29, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/business/a-mogul-who-would-rebuild-new-orleans.html (accessed September 1, 2016).

See Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012), especially chapter 5; Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, eds., Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991).

The list of “Organizational Outreach Targets” for this emergency response and referral network included domestic violence programs, emergency shelters, rent/utility assistance programs, health outreach programs, HIV/AIDS education programs, mental health programs, job training programs, job placement programs, food banks, substance use treatment facilities, youth shelters, transitional housing programs, and an array of faith-based missions and houses. This list was regularly maintained and updated, to allow for organizations that did not survive after the storm, as well as the new ones that popped up.

For WWAV’s public messaging of these projects, see “Join WWAV in Fighting Drug Testing for TANF Recipients,” http://wwav-no.org/drug-testing-for-tanf (accessed March 1, 2017); and “Micro-Enterprise, WWAV Style,” http://wwav-no.org/micro-enterprise-wwav-style-creating-beauty-ending-poverty (accessed March 1, 2017).

Wendy Brown, “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights,” in Left Legalism, Left Critique, edited by Janet Halley and Wendy Brown (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 432.

Programs included in the emergency response and referral network were also key base-building and outreach sites, as staff and participants in these programs needed to be made aware of the challenges facing people with CANS convictions if they were going to be able to also assist with referrals.

In her article on the CANS legal fight, Andrea Ritchie outlines the story of how she first learned about the CANS crisis from me, while she was working as the Director of the Sex Worker Outreach Project (SWOP) at the Urban Justice Center and I was working as the Director of Project UNSHACKLE at the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP). Ritchie was familiar with WWAV through INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence’s work on policing of women and transgender people of color. See Andrea J. Ritchie, “Crimes Against Nature: Challenging Criminalization of Queerness and Black Women’s Sexuality,” Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law 14, no. 2 (2013): 357.

In our July 2013 interview, attorney Bill Quigley, former CCR Legal Director and Loyola University Law Professor, explained how his practice of “social change lawyering” is modeled on the principles of legal aid during the Black Freedom Struggle. See also Quigley, “Ten Questions for Social Change Lawyers,” in Loyola University College of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2272227 (accessed March 1, 2017).

Essential to building and executing this campaign strategy were several longtime allies of WWAV, including the Women’s Health and Justice Initiative (WHJI), Voice Of The Ex-Offender (VOTE), and the LGBT Youth Project at Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (which would become BreakOUT!). In the spring and Summer of 2010, Shana griffin of WHJI and Rosana Cruz of VOTE, both WWAV board members, joined staff in crafting the NO Justice organizing strategy from the founding project objectives established the summer before: (1) Engage, support, empower women most at risk; (2) Influence key players in the criminal justice system to immediately reduce and/or halt further prosecutions; and (3) Secure systematic challenge to the statute through the courts. Each of these objectives was broken down into tangible short-term and long-term goals. At this point, WWAV explicitly named public advocacy, community engagement/education, and media campaign/advocacy as goals.

Agathocleous, “Building a Movement for Justice.”

Center for Constitutional Rights, “Doe v. Jindal complaint.” The day the lawsuit was filed, WWAV and the legal team held a press conference that included Bill Quigley, CCR Legal Director; Alexis Agathocleous, CCR Staff Attorney; Andrea J. Ritchie, Esq., private attorney focusing on police misconduct and co-author of Queer (In)Justice; Davida Finger, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law Law Clinic; Deon Haywood, Women With a Vision Executive Director; Wes Ware, Lead Youth Advocate, Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana; and Shana griffin, Women’s Health and Justice Initiative.

In our interview, Bill Quigley described how he and Deon Haywood were asked to explain the sexual practices criminalized under the CANS statute in graphic detail before the House Committee. After the House Committee’s unanimous ruling, Deon Haywood turned to him and asked, “What do we do next?” Quigley replied, “I don’t know. We don’t usually win.”

While the legislative repeal of the CANS statute was building, two motions had been filed to dismiss the federal lawsuit: one by the state on April 11, 2011, and the other by the city of New Orleans on May 17, 2011. On June 14, 2011, the NO Justice legal team filed opposition to these motions and then filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit on June 23, 2011. On September 7, 2011, Judge Feldman ruled that the lawsuit would proceed. On October 31, 2011, the NO Justice legal team moved for summary judgment. See CCR, “Crime Against Nature by Solicitation Litigation.”

Audrey Doe, et al. v. Bobby Jindal, et al., “Order and Reasons,” 29. Defendants included Governor Bobby Jindal; Attorney General James D. Buddy Caldwell; Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) James M. LeBlanc; Superintendent of the DPSC Colonel Michael D. Edmonson; Deputy Superintendent of the DPSC, Office of the State Police, Charles Dupuy; Director of the DPSC, Division of Probation and Parole, Eugenie C. Powers; Assistant Director of the DPSC, Division of Probation and Parole, Barry Matheny; Commissioner of the DPSC, Office of Motor Vehicles, Nick Gautreaux; and Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, Ronal W. Serpas.

WWAV, “OUR WIN.”

Judge Feldman granted summary judgment on March 29, 2012. On April 11, 2012, Feldman’s formal judgment declared sex offender registration under Louisiana’s CANS law unconstitutional, and ordered that the state remove the NO Justice plaintiffs from the registry within thirty days. See CCR, “Crime Against Nature by Solicitation Litigation.” Alexis Agathocleous, CCR Staff Attorney, explained that when he called the people named in the lawsuit to share the details of the formal judgment, each person started to cry when he said, “A judge found that the state of Louisiana violated your rights.”

This point was emphasized by Zina Mitchell in an interview I conducted with her on June 4, 2012.

Statement made to Deon Haywood in 2013, after the 2012 ruling was extended to all people with CANS convictions.

Women With A Vision, “Victory at Last!,” October 28, 2013, http://wwav-no.org/victory-at-last-louisiana-has-removed-hundreds-of-individuals-unconstitutionally-placed-on-sex-offender-registry (accessed March 1, 2017).

During this period, Deon and I began to conceptualize an oral history project to document the steps to the NO Justice victory, which we planned to launch in the summer of 2012 as “We Spoke Our Truths.” We discussed the evolution the campaign, its pivot points, and its interpretations throughout this planning process.

WWAV, “OUR WIN.”

Ibid.

See Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 4.

Michael Kunzelman, “Louisiana Sex Law Violates Offenders’ Rights, Federal Judge Rules,” The Times Picayune, March 29, 2012, http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/03/louisiana_sex_law_violates_off.html (accessed March 1, 2017).

Women With A Vision, “Arson Destroys Women With A Vision Office,” May 25, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp8lEEj1rc4 (accessed March 1, 2017).

See Center for Constitutional Rights, “Crime Against Nature by Solicitation Litigation.”

The Data Center, “Who Lives in New Orleans and Metro Parishes Now?,” The Times Picayune, June 30, 2017, http://www.datacenterresearch.org/data-resources/who-lives-in-new-orleans-now/ (accessed August 1, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Laura McTighe

Laura McTighe is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and the cofounder and associate director of Front Porch Research Strategy. She comes to her work in the academy through twenty years of grassroots organizing in movements to end AIDS and prisons. Her research centers on the often-hidden histories, practices, and geographies of struggle in America’s zones of abandonment, and ask how visions for living otherwise become actionable. Her current book project, Born in Flames, is a collaborative ethnography of race, religion, and the spatiality of opposition, which she has researched and is writing alongside the leaders of Women With A Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans.

Deon Haywood

Deon Haywood is a southern black queer woman, an activist warrior, a mother and grandmother, and a breast cancer survivor. As the Executive Director of Women With A Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans, she led the organization after Hurricane Katrina in successfully striking down a “crime against nature” statute being used to criminalize street-based sex work, thereby securing the removal of more than 800 people from the Louisiana sex offender registry. For this work, she has been honored with numerous awards by groups across the United States in recognition of her leadership at the intersection of HIV/AIDS, harm reduction, LGBTQ rights, reproductive justice, anti-criminalization, and ending mass incarceration.