This book, Disreputable Women is a deeply transdisciplinary study of how black women use sex work and place making to claim economic, bodily, and sexual autonomy in a militarized city that is intent on displacing and caging them. It distills the production of these "disreputable women" during two major twentieth-century urban development processes in downtown San Diego, where municipal police, public health officials, and even activists designated street-involved sex workers and the places they congregated as blight.

It documents how some black women reconceptualized the public and private spheres by using residential hotels and multiuse commercial spaces for housing and work, controlling their erotic economies and their sexual-cultural lives. It marks how discrete and explicit intellectual, economic, and political practices by black women complicate a dominant understanding of red-light areas and black sex workers as undesirable contaminators to be "cleaned out." Instead, its intuitive framework of "disreputability" offers a more ethical and workable approach to imagining the built environment and its inhabitants—developing a rich and robust grammar for understanding black women's lives amid scenes of militarization and gendered anti-blackness.