Built on Women’s Bodies: An Author’s Response

Abstract

Across the twentieth century, police were the enforcers of public space, determining which women would be targeted as problems to solve. Sexual policing—the targeting and legal control of people’s bodies and their presumed sexual activities—was considered a marginal and degraded use of public resources, maligned by officers and residents alike. And yet, amid the recurring crises of legitimacy for police during the scandalous enforcement of Prohibition and the social uprisings of the 1960s, the contested practice of sexual policing was also central to the legitimization and legalization of police power. The Streets Belong to Us is a spatial history of the development of urban police regimes as embattled authorities fought to seize and consolidate power. But embedded in that work is an argument that the formation of police power—like the formation of cities themselves—cannot be understood without accounting for gender and the interlocking hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality that make gender meaningful. Focusing on sexual policing, the most historically gendered arena of law enforcement, from Prohibition in segregated Jim Crow to the rise of broken windows policing in the gentrifying 1980s, I argue that police power and the modern city were built on women’s bodies.