One Strike Evictions, State Space and the Production of Abject Black Female Bodies

Abstract

This article examines activist Connie Burton’s as well as other black women’s ‘political narratives’ of resistance to One Strike evictions. Contextualizing the One Strike policy within narratives of resistance to methods of discipline employed by public housing authorities will allow for an anchoring of this investigation of One Strike and no fault evictions in an analytical framework of governmentality. By focusing on disciplinary power in order to theorize state formations, the One Strike policy can be construed as a method of discipline that produces abject black female bodies and creates the ‘structural effect’ of a separate and bounded ‘state space’ from which black women should be excluded. This article will also demonstrate the ways in which the One Strike policy works to produce race, gender and space. This production of a social space that excludes black female bodies is predicated on legacies of racism and colonial dispossession.