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“The Streets Are My Home”: Black Male Sex Offenders, Hypersurveillance, and the Liminality of Home
- Feminist Formations
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 33, Issue 1, Spring 2021
- pp. 33-55
- 10.1353/ff.2021.0002
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
In Montgomery County, Maryland, there are approximately 330 individuals who are on the sex offender registry. Of those on the registry, roughly six percent are homeless or transient—the majority of which are lifetime-registered offenders convicted of violent sex crimes and/or ones involving a child. Black men make up nineteen percent of Montgomery County’s population, twenty-seven percent of registered sex offenders in the county, and an overwhelming seventy percent of homeless sex offenders. In this essay, I outline how juridical articulations of deviance produce Black male citizen subjects into perpetually homeless sex offenders who then find themselves lingering on the streets in racialized geographies marked as the proper homeplace for Black sexual deviance and violence. Drawing heavily on eighteen semi-structured ethnographic interviews conducted over two years, my own six years of experience as a shelter worker, and policies of homeless shelters across the county, I chart key strategies Black male sex offenders deploy to navigate and manage the day-to-day living on the streets under the regimes of hypersurveillance that make doing so seem impossible. They use the very liminality of home afforded to them to carve ways to belong to home despite the legal and cultural frameworks that deny them access.