We Spoke Our Truths

Chapter 3 follows WWAV’s process of organizing a systematic challenge to fight the criminalization of our community in the wake of Hurricane Katrina under Louisiana’s “Crime Against Nature by Solicitation” (CANS) statute, which mandated sex offender registration for a period of fifteen years or for life for the simple act of soliciting oral or anal sex. Our NO Justice Project was rooted in the everyday and intimate texture of Black cisgender and transgender women’s criminalization in the New Orleans present and past. We underline how, throughout American history, technologies of surveillance had to continually be expanded and reasserted by official state actors precisely because of Black women’s refusal of them. This fact brings historical momentousness to WWAV’s founding vision, the constitutional challenge of the CANS statute that we supported our legal team in bringing, and the texture of our organizing work for the liberation of Black women and girls.