Protection for Whom? Police Legitimacy and the Historical Origins of Carceral Feminism

In a reflection on Anne Gray Fischer’s The Streets Belong to Us, this article considers how her scholarship on sexual policing in 20th century America situates sexual policing and the state’s criminalization of women as central rather than supplemental to our broader understanding of policing. Fischer’s analysis demonstrates how police used sexual policing to bolster their authority amid threats to their legitimacy and to defend and protect a racially segregated patriarchal social order. Her research also uncovers the centrality of anti-Black and gendered policing to gentrification and urban economic revival. Finally, Fischer historicizes white dominance feminists’ partnership with law enforcement by demonstrating law enforcement’s historical (and racialized) decriminalization of white women’s public sexual lives. Fischer’s pathbreaking analysis suggests the need for historians of policing and the carceral state to view gender and sexuality as foundational to the construction of modern policing and the broader development of the racialized carceral state.