One Strike Evictions, State Space and the Production of Abject Black Female Bodies Tiffany Lethabo King University of Maryland – College Park, USA 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. Keywords black women’s activism, governmentality, One Strike evictions, sociology, welfare reform Introduction The housing authority is an arm of the State and is opposed to the community organizing in its own interests. Self determination threatens that. All around the country, the government is tearing down projects. African people have a right to plan their own future. My position is to educate the people as to their ability to take power. I’m there to energize the people. 1 (Connie Burton,Tampa Florida resident and activist, 2003) Just how far of a reach does the state’s arm have? Connie Burton’s political narrative (James 1993), chronicling her struggles with theTampa Housing Authority (THA) from 1999 to 2005, provides us with a rich ‘theory from below’ (Corrigan and Sayer 1985) Critical Sociology 36(1) 45-64 Copyright © The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and Permissions: DOI: 10.1177/0896920509347140 http://www.sage.pub.co.uk/journals.permissions.nav http://crs.sagepub.com at GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY on June 28, 2016 crs.sagepub.com Downloaded from