Anne Gray Fischer

This project examines the sexual policing of women as the racial and sexual politics of US cities underwent dramatic transformations across the twentieth century. Between 1930 and 1980, two contradictory developments emerged: the gradual liberalization of sexual prohibitions, and the mounting force of a racially charged program of law-and-order morals policing. This project focuses on the discretionary police enforcement of a suite of broadly defined morals misdemeanors, including disorderly conduct, lewdness, and prostitution—which were primarily deployed against women—to explore how changing racial and gendered meanings of sexual criminality shaped police practices. By illuminating both the raced dimension of sexual liberalism and the gendered dimension of policing in black communities, this project reshapes understandings of the relationship of race, gender, and sexuality to the development of modern legal regimes in the United States.

“Going Ballistic” delivers an unwritten history of feminists who advocated taking up arms in self-defense between the 1970s and the early twenty-first century—a crucial turning point in the polarization of gun politics and the buildup of carceral solutions to violence against women. Drawing on an overlooked archive of feminist print culture, court records, and oral histories, “Going Ballistic” recovers the short-lived mobilization—and lasting impact—of feminists’ militant defense of reproductive, sexual, and bodily freedom against the backdrop of the rising Second Amendment movement for unfettered gun rights. By following the rise of the gun rights movement in the illuminating wake of armed feminism, “Going Ballistic” disrupts conventional political binaries, reorients our perspective on the role of the state in gender-based protection, and reckons with an armed feminist vision for a broader horizon of collective safety and bodily autonomy.