ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces an activist group in New Orleans that organized against a law criminalizing sex workers. It follows the post-Hurricane Katrina moral panic which framed the identification of Black cisgender and transgender women as a social and political problem, noticing the transnational threads tying together forms of displacement deployed against so-called “third-world threats” and those learned and refined within the US’s own borders. The essay celebrates a rare victory in a court of law as activists countered social death with vibrant defiance. Their strategy provides an invaluable example of how the “folk devils” of moral panics might call on a very different “spirit” of conceptual and physical resistance to disrupt a panic’s own logics––not only demonstrating what a morally appropriate social response looks like but also prefiguring a society in which that vision can be realized.
