Papers by Sa Whitley
, and a founding member of the Debt Collective. Her research, writing, and teaching focus on the ... more , and a founding member of the Debt Collective. Her research, writing, and teaching focus on the daily life of capitalism and the economic imagination. She has a forthcoming book (Duke 2019) on U.S. oil companies in Central Africa, and has published extensively on Occupy Wall Street and the economic imagination.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2022
This article explores the impact of the subprime foreclosure crisis on black transgender women in... more This article explores the impact of the subprime foreclosure crisis on black transgender women in Baltimore, Maryland, by thinking with Project 42, a series of art installations curated by trans artist Molly Jae Vaughan that memorializes forty-two trans murder victims in the United States. Focusing on the project's memorialization of the late Tyra Trent, a black transgender woman who was murdered in a city-owned vacant property in the Central Park Heights neighborhood, the essay considers the textile design of Project 42’s “memorial garment” for Tyra Trent, which includes a pattern with the abstraction of the Google Earth imaging of the murder location, and black trans dance artist Aísha Noir's performance in the honorary dress as a collaborator with Vaughan for Project 42 installations. What follows is a political reflection at the intersection of black feminism, economic geography, and urban planning that demonstrates how black transfeminist worldmaking invites us to “revitalize” or replace traditional urban planning projects and challenge gendered racial capitalism.
Institute on Democracy & Inequality , 2019
We live in an age of mass debt and high finance. What forms of collective economic power are poss... more We live in an age of mass debt and high finance. What forms of collective economic power are possible and necessary in this moment? Can “debtor” be a broadly salient political identity in the age of finance? Where “worker” became a widely salient political identity that enabled the formation of labor unions in the industrialized era, are debtors’ unions possible today? This white paper seeks to answer these questions.
Thesis Chapters by Sa Whitley
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore engages the experiences, co... more The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore engages the experiences, community organizing, and alternative economic frameworks of black queer and transgender women in the age of “credit-led accumulation” and neoliberal urban planning projects that stimulate the gentrification of black neighborhoods (Soederberg 2013). This black feminist ethnography, situated within the overlapping geographies of urban renewal programs, subprime foreclosure, and speculative urbanism, foregrounds the contested place in black queer spatial imaginaries of private property in a city with 30,000 vacant properties and lots. Specifically, I examine Brioxy’s black land movement in West Baltimore – an effort that seeks to forestall gentrification and “keep the hood black.” From black placemaking to “putting a stake in the ground” against gentrification, I consider how black queer organizers figure the post-crisis financial and real estate markets as sites of both subjection and possibility. Provocatively, the collective puts forth a collectivized model of black private property ownership as opposition to structural processes of gentrification and black displacement. At the same time, they engage in what I call speculative social reproduction across black queer households to confront the antiblackness of speculative finance capitalism.
As a critical intervention, this dissertation discloses the ongoing violence of liberal property and propertied citizenship by contesting contemporary constructions of the subprime foreclosure crisis itself. This project centers archives of effects overlooked in standard accounts, including the life and death of a black transgender woman killed in a vacant residential property. In dialogue with queer of color analyses of capitalism’s contradictions, I characterize Baltimore’s landscapes of subprime architectures and consider the ways that decades of urban renewal and foreclosure policies regulate black trans life and produce untimely death. Case studies of black queer and trans placemaking compel us to consider the ways that black queer and trans folx aim to variously appropriate, disassemble, refuse, or “disidentify” with property and “propertied citizenship” (Mu�oz 1999; Roy 2003).
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Papers by Sa Whitley
Thesis Chapters by Sa Whitley
As a critical intervention, this dissertation discloses the ongoing violence of liberal property and propertied citizenship by contesting contemporary constructions of the subprime foreclosure crisis itself. This project centers archives of effects overlooked in standard accounts, including the life and death of a black transgender woman killed in a vacant residential property. In dialogue with queer of color analyses of capitalism’s contradictions, I characterize Baltimore’s landscapes of subprime architectures and consider the ways that decades of urban renewal and foreclosure policies regulate black trans life and produce untimely death. Case studies of black queer and trans placemaking compel us to consider the ways that black queer and trans folx aim to variously appropriate, disassemble, refuse, or “disidentify” with property and “propertied citizenship” (Mu�oz 1999; Roy 2003).
As a critical intervention, this dissertation discloses the ongoing violence of liberal property and propertied citizenship by contesting contemporary constructions of the subprime foreclosure crisis itself. This project centers archives of effects overlooked in standard accounts, including the life and death of a black transgender woman killed in a vacant residential property. In dialogue with queer of color analyses of capitalism’s contradictions, I characterize Baltimore’s landscapes of subprime architectures and consider the ways that decades of urban renewal and foreclosure policies regulate black trans life and produce untimely death. Case studies of black queer and trans placemaking compel us to consider the ways that black queer and trans folx aim to variously appropriate, disassemble, refuse, or “disidentify” with property and “propertied citizenship” (Mu�oz 1999; Roy 2003).