While mainstream representations of queer migration often privilege North–South liberation narratives, Christina Carney’s project complicates such binaries by tracing how African American queer mobility participates in new forms of racial capitalism that commodify Blackness as both heritage and erotic spectacle. Through fieldwork that included interviews with Afro-Brazilian lesbian, bisexual, and trans women engaged in sex work and cultural entrepreneurship, and with African American expatriates, tour organizers, and heritage tourists, her research interrogates the ways queer migrants create and navigate transnational social spaces shaped by belonging, desire, and class privilege between Afro-Americans and Afro-Brazilians.
With a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at San Diego, Christina Carney is an associate professor of Black (Queer) Sexuality Studies in the Departments of Women’s & Gender Studies and Black Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her latest book, Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego (2025) was published by the University of California Press. Her work has been supported by the University of Missouri Research Board, Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation), and U.S. Fulbright Scholars Program. She has published articles in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Quarterly, and Radical History Review. Carney also serves on the editorial board for African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.
