Saturday, January 6, 2024
Grand Ballroom (Hilton Union Square)
New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) harassed the budding LGBTQ community relentlessly in the 1950s and through the 1960s. Working-class queer women and transmasculine people were particularly vulnerable due to their gender and sexual identity. Despite city ordinance giving NOPD the authority and power to harass and enact violence against queer women and transmasculine people, this community made a place for themselves in the space of New Orleans. Queer women and transmasculine people resisted and persisted in heteronormative spaces by finding community, self-fashioning their own gender identity, and by place-making in even the most hostile of spaces. For many queer women and transmasculine people, the arrest experience was central to their shared experiences and later the central call to action in civil rights efforts after Stonewall. For many queer women and transmasculine people, the violence in the arrest did not stop once the police placed them in handcuffs. It continued into the jails that would hold them until they were released. Historically New Orleans jails were documented spaces for physical, verbal, and sexual violence. But spaces of incarceration did not stop at the jail, it continued to the police wagon and court houses that were all connected to the same purpose. Spaces of incarceration were intended to be a tool to harass undesirables out of the city or hold them away from the rest heteronormative society. This poster will demonstrate the persistence required to make a place for the community in New Orleans as police and city laws tried to regulate queer women and transmasculine people continued into spaces of incarceration. Queer women and transmasculine people resisted by finding each other in the cell and making it a place for the community.
The poster will be divided into five sections: Overview, Harassment, Moving Place, Gender in Jail, and Sentencing. The overview will give context for the 1950s, and 1960’s New Orleans and the environment of harassment being set up by citizens' committees as queer women and transmasculine people developed a community. The harassment section will demonstrate that NOPD would arrest people based on their gender presentation and spatial location. While also showing how the community resisted these regulations by being more visible. Moving place brings police wagons into the discussion on spaces of incarceration and how they are moving to places where women could identify with each other. Gender in the Jell will reconstruct the cells in New Orleans from the perspective of queer women and transmasculine people and how they reshaped the space to make it a place by making physical changes or through emotional support. Finally, Sentencing demonstrates the connection to defining gender and sexuality in the courts. Still, when a raid places all these people in one place, it makes them aware of the number of queer people in New Orleans and that they are not alone. Finding each other in the most unlikely of places is an act of resistance.
The poster will be divided into five sections: Overview, Harassment, Moving Place, Gender in Jail, and Sentencing. The overview will give context for the 1950s, and 1960’s New Orleans and the environment of harassment being set up by citizens' committees as queer women and transmasculine people developed a community. The harassment section will demonstrate that NOPD would arrest people based on their gender presentation and spatial location. While also showing how the community resisted these regulations by being more visible. Moving place brings police wagons into the discussion on spaces of incarceration and how they are moving to places where women could identify with each other. Gender in the Jell will reconstruct the cells in New Orleans from the perspective of queer women and transmasculine people and how they reshaped the space to make it a place by making physical changes or through emotional support. Finally, Sentencing demonstrates the connection to defining gender and sexuality in the courts. Still, when a raid places all these people in one place, it makes them aware of the number of queer people in New Orleans and that they are not alone. Finding each other in the most unlikely of places is an act of resistance.