New Orleans: A Special Issue on the Gender Politics of Place and Displacement

In the fall of 2005, the editors of this special NWSAJ issue, like most of the United States and many throughout the world, witnessed via mass media the destruction that was unleashed by Hurricane Katrina on the city and region surrounding New Orleans and the complete failure of governmental institutions to meet the enormous need for survival assistance the storm occasioned. For one of us, this was intensely personal; all of her immediate family lives in New Orleans and the greater New Orleans area. As they learned they could not return to New Orleans in the foreseeable future, many of her family members traveled to Akron, Ohio with their pets and the few belongings they had packed, for what they had initially believed to be the annual hurricane season evacuation.

Many Akron neighbors and friends rushed to find a way to help our colleague in her determination to house, feed, and comfort her elderly parents and her adult sisters and brothers who had lost their homes, jobs, businesses, and sense of safety and well-being. Her seven-year-old niece, whose father was a police officer still on duty in the crisis-ridden city of New Orleans, needed to be registered for school and, more importantly, needed reassurance that all would be well, despite the fact that her home, her friends, and her way of life had vanished overnight. Suddenly, Katrina was in Ohio.

Even as we searched through our closets for multisized cold-weather clothes, prepared easy-to-reheat dinners, located an extra refrigerator, and installed an outlet in our colleague’s garage to power it, we talked to each other. As scholars with varied academic training, that fall we found ourselves reaching for slightly different answers to the same basic questions that everyone was asking: Why and how did this disaster come about? How could—or would—the dire situations of people throughout the affected region be resolved? What should we think about this ruinous state of affairs? What would happen to the city of New Orleans, and what would Katrina come to mean to us culturally, socially, and historically? How would the devastation of the Mississippi Delta impact our nation and others globally? What lessons can we take away from this catastrophe to carry out more humane preparations, responses and recoveries in the future?

Race and Class, but not Gender

Within hours of the calls for a mandatory evacuation, television and Internet viewers all over the world would easily surmise that vast numbers of New Orleanians had already been “left behind” years ago (Masquelier 2006, 736). After the levees broke, media images of drowned residents and beckoning survivors highlighted New Orleans as an American city with an African American majority. This was so surprising to so many in the United States and internationally that subsequent media objectification and distortion of the city left its residents often framed simply in terms of “black” and “white,” relegating those with Latina/o, Native American, Filipino, Vietnamese, other and mixed cultural identities—for which the region is so renowned—to a position of virtual invisibility. In the following weeks and months, further public dismay and then outrage was punctuated by explicit debate over the significance of race and class in the effects that the storm had on residents, and the specific role played by race and class in evacuation, rescue, and rebuilding efforts, as well as in media reportage.

As scholars attuned to race, class, and their convergences, we vigorously challenged media distortions and participated in ongoing analyses. But, as feminist scholars, we also found ourselves frustrated by the inattention to the simultaneous and intersecting dimension of gender—and not only because our training had long prepared us to notice the way that race and class were always inflected with gendered significance. It seemed to go unnoticed how central women were to every aspect of the disaster and to every facet of the exodus it generated—and how centered women were in the media presentation of both. Old...