Spitting Back at Law and Order: Donnetta Hill’s Rage in an Era of Vengeance

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze the rise of vengeful populism in relation to sex workers in late twentieth-century Philadelphia as part of the popular response to the transformation in the city’s political economy. I juxtapose vengeful populism with the rage of Donnetta Hill, a Black sex worker tried and convicted for the murder of two men the state alleged were her clients. In order to appreciate the contours of rage as a fiery cascade of affect, emotion, and action in the hands of a Black woman who faced violence, economic depravation, and social ostracization, I draw on Black feminist thought, especially as located in Audre Lorde’s writing, about the generative nature of Black women’s and Black feminist rage. Rage, in the context of Black feminist analysis and in Hill’s actions preceding and after her conviction—which I classify as a spitting rage—signifies a form of power connected to self-preservation and the fierce desire to maintain one’s chosen bonds of family, kin, and community. Rage is thereafter a positive program of self-definition, resistance, and world making. I highlight the contours of Hill’s rage as a generative, if confined and constrained, force over and against the novel enclosures related to the transformation in urban geography, political economy, and politics in the decade and a half between 1980 and 1995. Though Hill’s politics remain largely illegible because of the bloody and vocal expression of her disquiet, I want to appreciate these as abolitionist resources, however constrained and impinged on by the violent context in which Hill attempted to survive and live in the wake of social and economic abandonment.