Research Focus Group Talk: “I just needed a place to sleep”: Sex Offense, Housing Insecurity, and the Value of Surplus Sex

Registered sex offenders frequently report experiencing homelessness due to their stigmatized and heavily policed status. As a result, many have to rely on various sectors of the informal economy to survive in a system that is designed to keep them in perpetual motion while also demanding they be visible, discoverable, and traceable to a fixed location for public safety. In this talk, Terrance Wooten interrogates the ways in which the sex offender registry not only produces housing insecurity for sex offender registrants but also creates the conditions under which housing insecure registrants are forced to engage in survival sex in exchange for a place to sleep.

Terrance Wooten is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, tentatively titled Lurking in the Shadows of Home: Homelessness, Carcerality, and the Figure of the Sex Offender, which examines how those who have been designated “sex offenders” and are homeless in the Maryland/DC area are managed and regulated through social policies, sex offender registries, and urban and architectural design.

Sponsored by the IHC’s New Sexualities Research Focus Group