Gender, Place and Culture

ISSN: 0966-369X (Print) 1360-0524 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc20

Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape

of social reproduction

Cindi Katz

To cite this article: Cindi Katz (2008) Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape of social
reproduction, Gender, Place and Culture, 15:1, 15-29, DOI: 10.1080/09663690701817485

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690701817485

Published online: 12 Feb 2008.

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Gender, Place and Culture
Vol. 15, No. 1, February 2008, 15–29

THE GPC JAN MONK DISTINGUISHED LECTURE

Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape of social
reproduction
Cindi Katz*

City University of New York, Graduate Center, USA

Hurricane Katrina scoured the political economic landscape of New Orleans revealing
the toll of decades of disinvestment in and ‘hostile privatism’ toward social
reproduction in a city with corrosive inequalities around class, race, and gender. This
piece addresses the failures of the state and capital around issues of social reproduction
in the wake of Katrina, and gestures toward the sorts of activism these failures have
called forth. Organized around five elements of social reproduction, including the
environment and relief infrastructure, health care, education, housing, and social
justice, the essay argues that the absence of these elements of the social wage both
created conditions that made Katrina a disaster and thwarted response to the storm’s
social, economic, and physical destruction in New Orleans. The costs can be seen
most obviously in the unevenness of neighborhood and infrastructural recovery, the
difficulty of establishing a stable workforce of residents because of the lack of support
for workers and their families which especially affects women and lone parents, and the
deepening of various neoliberal tendencies toward privatization in education, health
care, and housing. Examining the classed, gendered, and racialized nature of these
issues, I will look at community based social movements working to redress this
situation, and interrogate the underlying politics and policies – explicit and implicit –
that have produced this situation.

Keywords: social reproduction; hurricane Katrina; New Orleans; activism;

neoliberalism

Helen Hill was a beautiful and talented filmmaker. She was an activist, a mother, a vegan
with a pot-bellied pig, a dedicated member of her community, and by all accounts a loving
and spirited friend, neighbor, and family member. On 4 January 2007 she was murdered at
home in New Orleans before her husband and toddler son’s eyes. Hers was the sixth New
Orleans murder in 24 hours, part of a week in which there would be 12, the start of a year
that saw its 99th murder on 1 July. The day of Hill’s tragic death, I was to give a talk at
Zeitgeist, a fabulous storefront community arts center in central city New Orleans.1
I arrived to find Rene Broussard, the passionate founder and programmer of Zeitgeist,
devastated. Helen Hill was his close friend and an integral part of Zeitgeist. In a flash an
anonymous tragedy became intimate. Hill’s death continues to haunt, but fittingly this has
spurred me to get to know something about her life and work, and her ebullient spirit and

*Email: ckatz@gc.cuny.edu

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online

q 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09663690701817485
http://www.informaworld.com
16 C. Katz

deep commitments to love, humor, art, (un)common decency, and everyday justice are
irrepressible. An inspiration.
At the time of her death, Helen Hill was making an animated film, ‘The Florestine
Collection’, about a dressmaker and the dresses she had lovingly made of scraps of fabric.
Inspired by about 100 dresses found in a thrift shop in 2001, Hill learned about Florestine,
a 90 year old blind woman, who had patched together these remarkable feats of color,
texture, and design. The dresses were disposed of upon Florestine’s death, but in their
visionary beauty Hill saw a metaphor for New Orleans. The dressmaker’s bricolage was
rehearsed and reworked in Hill’s project, a paean to Florestine’s artistry and the patchwork
city they both called home. And so I try to honor them in this piece.
New Orleans, it is often said, is the southernmost port of the United States and the
northernmost port of the Caribbean. It is a city whose strange wonderfulness – that vibrant
patchwork of beautiful, colorful, messy difference – is celebrated more than its hideous
horribleness – the twisted legacies of venal corruption shot through with deep if quirky
racism – is mourned and criticized. Before I slip into the hyperbolic dance of urban cliché
that New Orleans often calls forth, I want to draw a sobering line from Helen Hill’s
bricolage of Florestine’s bricolage to the increasingly apparent fact that their reductive
collapse can also be seen everywhere in contemporary New Orleans. In post-Katrina New
Orleans (and long before it as well) it is possible to see all that is wrong with neoliberal
capitalism as it works over a landscape of racialized and gendered class inequality,
injustice, and enduring cronyism and corruption. I guess you could say it’s a different kind
of bricolage, but it seems to me that neoliberal capitalism and what George Lipsitz (2006),
with typically perfect pitch, calls the ‘social warrant of hostile privatism’, which
lubricates, naturalizes and sustains it, are in every way reductive. They close off and
narrow possibilities in the spaces of everyday life so that all the lively intersections
examined and often celebrated in post-structuralist analyses and identity politics become
more a vortex than a lithe matrix of intersecting identifications. It is this vortex and the
collapse it suggests that I want to attend to here.
Underneath all the physical wreckage and debris, what Katrina and the flood in its
wake scoured was the desperately uneven landscape of social reproduction in New
Orleans. It revealed the costs of long term disinvestments in the social wage, the toll of
‘hostile privatism’, the patterns of enduring racial segregation, and the peculiar
geographies of states rights, cronyism, and the militarized security state all jumbled
together. It was my long-term interest in the politics of social reproduction that brought me
to address the effects of Katrina, not the other way around. But given this interest, it was
impossible for me not to confront the hideous effects of one of the most galvanizing, most
tragic and most symptomatic events of our time. Here it is illuminating and instructive
politically to compare it to that other pivotal event of the present era, 11 September 2001,
regarding the nature of governmental and individual responses. In the interests of space,
I can do little more here than point to this comparison, but to do so at least puts questions
about rights to the city and the nature of bodies and lives that matter into the conversation.
Landfall is not just a physical question. Geography is always socially produced. And so
every landscape can reveal sedimented and contentious histories of occupation; struggles
over land use and clashes over meaning, rights of occupancy, and rights to resources.
Katrina churned through historical geographies of extraordinary multiculturalism but
extreme racial segregation, of amazing environmental wealth exploited rapaciously, of
mythic significance in the American and even global imaginary whose celebrations
masked the enduring legacies of poverty and discrimination that they fed off and opposed.
New Orleans is a city that Peirce Lewis (2003) aptly characterized as ‘impossible but
 Gender, Place and Culture 17

inevitable’ – an impossible geography made and remade and unmade and remade through
labor, engineering, management, and mismanagement, which ripples with indomitable
inventiveness undergirded by extraordinary hubris. Sedimentations are not just the effects
of direct environmental engagement, of course, but the outcomes of material social
practices at all scales.
Katrina’s landscape was also the outcome of social relations and policy decisions made
distant and near. The hurricane hit at the then nadir of a three decades-long deterioration in
the social wage; a combination of social relations and policies at the national, state, and
municipal scales that eroded virtually every aspect of social reproduction, except those
associated with militarism and policing. And so, not surprisingly, Katrina revealed the
contours of visceral racism – residential, occupational, and environmental; the costs of
enduring social and environmental injustice; the neglect of crucial infrastructure including
even New Orleans’s intricate water management system; and the evisceration of public
support for housing, healthcare, education, and social welfare.2 The storm struck an
historical geography reeling from the effects of devolution, privatization, military
neoliberalism, and states rights in a notorious state.
Within this landscape of depletion, New Orleans was worse off than most US cities;
its schools failing, its prison population large and growing with a perfunctory public
defender apparatus funded through parking tickets, its public housing inadequate and
under-funded, and its levels of concentrated poverty among the highest in the nation. In late
August 2005, for example, 27% of the population lived below the federal poverty level, the
unemployment rate was over 10% citywide but 40% in certain neighborhoods such as
the lower ninth ward, two-thirds of the city’s public schools were labeled ‘failing’, there
was a single public hospital required to treat un- and under-insured patients, and the
rickety racist legal system had produced instability and ‘demographic collapse’ in poor
black neighborhoods, to use Clyde Woods’ (2005) compelling term. All of this and more
were exposed by the effects of the hurricane and the woeful government response to it.
Worse even than what Katrina revealed to the nation and the world about the hardened
contours of racialized impoverishment and the residual costs of environmental
exploitation was that it made the inconsequentiality of poor people’s lives – particularly
poor black people – to those in power horrifyingly clear not just on a world stage, but in
their hearts. The wholesale abandonment of the poor on the part of the state and capital
in New Orleans was not a turn of phrase or hyperbolic calling to attention in the wake of
Katrina. It was a social fact. This appalling social fact, made visible by Katrina as
spectacle, called forth tremendous sympathy, reminding Americans, again, of the
structural racisms and obdurate poverty at our nation’s core, which the discourse of
neoliberalism works to make invisible. But what is demanded by this situation is not just
relief – though more of that would have been a fine thing – but rather a political response
that not only sustains people in this time of great and on-going need, but also reworks and
ultimately resists the conditions that have produced these circumstances, which are all
about social reproduction made impossible. But this ‘impossible’ must be unhinged from
‘inevitable’.
To look at the response to Katrina within the framework of social reproduction both
reveals the extent and gravity of pressing issues on the ground and makes clear how central
social reproduction is to ongoing production, everyday life, and all aspects of recovery and
restoration. In this context I also want to ask where the means of social reproduction have
come from and with what consequences. Who has been responsible for restoring daily life,
for reclaiming, reconstructing, and reviving the means of production; and for returning
the provisions associated with the social wage and remaking the means of its mediation?
18 C. Katz

This work is infrastructural, structural, social, political economic, and cultural and will
be accomplished (or not) by a fluid combination of the state, the household, capital, and
‘civil society’, including community groups, religious organizations, and NGOs. It
commonly rides on, bears – and bares – the traces of gendered, classed, and racialized
divisions of labor. While, on the one hand, my point is that the nature of the response to
Katrina – or the lack thereof – is indicative of the effects of long-term disinvestment in
the social wage on the part of the state and capital and their commitment to neoliberal
precepts – although the extent of callousness was nevertheless shocking – on the other
hand, the events as crisis have provoked an opportunity to remake the material social
practices of everyday life in ways that alter our collective expectations of ourselves and the
social forms and institutions through which we both make our lives and make them
sensible. That challenge drives my conclusion. To get there, I want to sketch out some of
the responses witnessed on the ground in New Orleans as a way of showing the ongoing
crisis in social reproduction, but also some of the spaces for political action it has opened.
These concerns reveal – not coincidentally – the tangled integument that connects social
reproduction to production, the environment, everyday life, and the cultural forms and
practices that might, or might not, sustain them.

Elements of social reproduction

Social reproduction encompasses the broad material social practices and forces associated
with sustaining production and social life in all its variations. It is the stuff of everyday life
as well as the structuring forces that constitute any social formation. Its temporality is at
once daily, generational, and the longue durée. Its spatiality is similarly varied; it has no
single scale such as the household or the community, but rather is everywhere bound
dialectically to production. It is not reducible to consumption, ideology, or the making of
a labor force, but embraces all of these and more in a fluid congeries of material social
practices with three aspects – political economic, cultural, and environmental – that are
accomplished by social actors in multiple social contexts associated with the state, the
workplace, the household, and civil society. How social reproduction is accomplished and
by whom, as much as what it properly includes, are social questions that have been the
focus of labor, community, and household struggles for more than a century, reaching
a turning point around 1973 when hard-fought gains both in what it was seen to encompass
and in getting capital and the state to cover it began to reverse.3 Neoliberal imperatives,
which were nascent then and have been ascendant since, have been associated with
concerted attempts by the state and capitalists to offload responsibility for social
reproduction onto individuals and households as well as civil society organizations such as
community groups, religious institutions, and other non-governmental organizations.
These largely successful efforts have had deeply problematic and sometimes disastrous
consequences, particularly for poor and disenfranchised people, especially women of
color.
My argument here is that Katrina revealed the disastrous face of enduring
disinvestment in social reproduction, and that it is this disinvestment and the ‘social
warrant of hostile privatism’ that has propelled and justified it that churned a hurricane and
flood into a ‘disaster’. I will focus on five aspects of social reproduction – environmental
infrastructure, health care, education, housing, and social justice – that were pivotal to the
wellbeing of New Orleans and its differentiated population before the storm, and have
been all the more so in recovery. Each aspect is associated with different levels of
government and different sorts of social actors. In briefly reviewing them I hope to make
 Gender, Place and Culture 19

clear the integrated nature of the material social practices of social reproduction and the
ways they are integral to the enduring rhythms of everyday life and recovery.

Environment and infrastructure

The first aspect of social reproduction I want to address concerns the environment and the
city’s physical infrastructure, both of which are crucial to ongoing production and
reproduction. New Orleans, as is well known, has some fairly unique requirements in this
regard, relying on extensive water management to endure both routine and extreme
situations. The levee system was largely the responsibility of the federal government
through the Army Corps of Engineers.4 The existing system was poorly maintained and
insufficient at that. It was well known that system could only withstand category 3 storms,
and long existing plans to improve it had been delayed repeatedly. This underdevelopment
was on a collision course with the increasing number and intensity of storms that appear to
be associated with ongoing global climate change, and leaves aside the question of
the propensity toward techno-engineering ‘solutions’ for ecological problems.
The catastrophic result of this situation is well known, and more than $7 billion was
spent after Katrina to repair and improve the levees. But according to a recent report by the
Army Corps of Engineers, most of the city remains just as vulnerable as before to a large
(one in 100-year) storm, even as reconstruction in flood prone areas is underway. This
vulnerability is amplified by the insurance industry’s reluctance to underwrite construction
in many parts of the city.
The federal government’s hand in social reproduction also is paramount in emergency
relief. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was incorporated into the
Department of Homeland Security soon after it was established after 11 September 2001.
This shift coupled with its deprofessionalization5 under the Bush administration severely
compromised FEMA’s ability to function effectively, a fact tragically apparent in the
wake of Katrina. Here the question of ‘security’ – directly in relation to social
reproduction – is at the heart of the matter. The security in question, though, has been
obsessively focused on ‘terrorism’ and its threats at the expense of environmental hazards
and other dangers to social life and the environment. Further, concern with having
‘security to’ trumps ‘security of’, and so military expenditures and policing take from
investments that would secure the means of everyday mundane domestic life. There is not
no money, but rather political choices favor the war in ‘that’ Gulf over against recovery in
‘this’ Gulf. To the extent that federal funds have been spent on recovery, there have been
extraordinary levels of cronyism, with contracts routinely going to large corporations,
a focus on large-scale private development, and heavy attention to serving and securing
the petrochemical and tourism industries. There is a non-accidental sameness in many of
the contract recipients in both Gulfs, among them Halliburton and Blackwater. Choices
made at the federal level – both political and economic – exposed the physical
environment and infrastructure of New Orleans to danger before the storm, and hampered
its restoration after it, compromising social reproduction in multiple ways.

Health care
Health care, a crucial aspect of social reproduction, is implicated at all scales from the
individual to the national, but here I will focus on the role of the state government. Thanks
to the residues of mid-twentieth-century populism, Louisiana actually had a decent – if
shredding – health care system serving its large indigent population through much of the
20 C. Katz

century. Health care costs have risen sharply over the past couple of decades, worsening
the effects of federal and state disinvestments in health care provision and subsidization.
In its various incarnations, Charity Hospital, has (unevenly) served poor people in New
Orleans since the early eighteenth century – initially through a private bequest,
supplemented a century on with funds from the gambling act of 1823 and proceeds
from, among other things, the sale of slaves, with the sustaining labor of the Daughters of
Charity, and since 1970 as part of the state health system (Medical Center of Louisiana at
New Orleans 2007). The most recent structure, an imposing Deco building completed in
1939 with nearly 2700 beds, was severely damaged by the storm, and will not reopen.
Its neighbor, the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center University Hospital,
with which Charity was eventually integrated, reopened on an interim basis in November
2006, but to date fewer than 200 hospital beds are available through this facility, which
continues to be hampered by physical damage and shortages of equipment, supplies, and
staff. And this is typical. According to The New York Times, only one of the city’s seven
general hospitals was operating at pre-storm levels while two were partially operational by
the middle of 2007 (Eaton 2007). The shortage of beds and services is acute, and dire for
the many without health insurance. Not surprisingly, mortality rates in New Orleans have
risen sharply over the past year.
Federal and state support has been directed at reconstruction, but in recent months
serious attention has been given to luring health professionals back to the city. The federal
government, for instance, gave the Louisiana state health department a $15 million grant
in March 2007 intended to be used to provide incentives for health care professionals of all
kinds to return to practice in New Orleans. It is a hard sell, however, and physician,
nursing, and ancillary staff shortages remain serious at all levels of the health care system
in the city (Eaton 2007; Liu and Plyer 2007; Louisiana Department of Health and
Hospitals 2007a, 2007b; Moran 2007). A key reason it has been so difficult to get health
care workers to return has everything to do with the interlocking nature of social
reproduction, and this must be recognized if staffing is ever to return to the levels required
for a fully functioning system. Tellingly, this issue is most apparent around the shortage of
nurses and other ancillary workers, who are in shorter supply than doctors (Congressional
Quarterly 2006; Wilson 2006). Given that most nurses and other support staff are women,
who under the prevailing gender divisions of labor tend to be responsible for their
children’s care, it is crucial that there be at a minimum a working formal or informal
system for child-care, safe and accessible schools, and places for children and teens to play
safely during non-school hours for these women to return to New Orleans. To the extent
that they cannot, however, there are ricocheting effects on the rest of the interlocking
system taken up with the social wage. All of these problems reveal the bedrock nature of
social reproduction to social and political economic life, and not coincidentally leach into
the next arena of social reproduction I want to address here, education.

Education
Education is at the heart of social reproduction at the city scale. The New Orleans public
school system was in poor shape before Katrina. At that time there were 117 public
schools – many of them underperforming – but as of the 2007/08 school year only 80 of
them had reopened, 41 of them as charter schools (Greater New Orleans Community Data
Center 2007).6 While many of these charter schools represent innovation, community
interests, and corporate and other private involvement, it remains that charter schools are
a wedge into privatization, and that the renovation of the New Orleans public school
 Gender, Place and Culture 21

system as a whole may be compromised by their development. As it is, the school system
has been divided in three – the independently run charter schools, the state run New
Orleans Recovery School District, and the vestigial Orleans Parish School Board which
comprises only five schools (Nossiter 2007). Not only has the reopening of schools been
coupled with privatization, but busting the teachers union, which had been quite strong
prior to Katrina, has been central to the process (Ritea 2006; Brenner 2007). In part this
was accomplished by the damage to and defunding of the Orleans Parish schools in the
wake of the storm, which led to widespread teacher layoffs. It was abetted by the forced
absence of many of the city’s experienced teachers, which enabled the schools to hire
inexperienced non-union teachers because of drastic personnel ‘shortages’. Yet the
interlocking and particularly gendered aspects of social reproduction that I am addressing
here were at the heart of this shortage, just as they were at the root of why so many health
care workers are missing.
But what was most striking when I visited New Orleans in January 2007 was perhaps the
most obvious thing – that schools anchor communities. Indeed, neighborhoods are
commonly defined by an elementary school’s catchment area. Without the customary
network of neighborhood schools (however troubled they may be), residential stability and
mutual engagement at the local scale is fraught. During the current school year (2007/08),
for instance, only about two-thirds of the city’s schools were operable, and these were
unevenly scattered geographically (Greater New Orleans Community Data Center 2007).
Some neighborhoods – often the most damaged ones, for obvious reasons – did not have an
open elementary school, requiring students to be bussed to other and unfamiliar areas.
Exacerbating this problem was the sharp reduction in faculty – as noted above, many
teachers were stymied in their return by the same knot of problems around social reproduction
as nurses and other health workers were – which required students to work in unfamiliar
settings with unfamiliar and often inexperienced teachers. These estrangements on top of an
already stressful situation have not helped – if in fact they have not added to – the problems
of school violence, underachievement, apathy, absenteeism, truancy and the like. One
response to these problems was to increase police presence and step up security measures, but
this may just have intensified the already well-established ‘school to prison pipeline’.

Housing
The question of neighborhood ties and community formation around schools raises
perhaps the most crucial current issue around social reproduction in New Orleans,
housing. Many of the activists and residents with whom I spoke in New Orleans
underscored that housing is the issue in recovery, and the signs thus far have not been
promising for low income, non-white residents and would-be returnees. There are three
pressing issues here: the assault on public housing, which preceded Katrina and exceeds its
local effects but was drastically exacerbated by the storm; the shortage of rental housing,
which has led to steep rent increases; and the narrow focus and woeful limits of
government programs to re-house people. Each of these issues impinges upon and
exacerbates the others, and all are made worse by the uneven geography of the flood’s
damage, which affected lower cost housing disproportionately.
Prior to Katrina about 5% of New Orleans’s population – roughly 20,000 people – lived
in public housing (Levy 2005). There were about 7500 units of public housing before
Katrina, of which about 5300 were occupied (Levy 2005). The vast majority of these were
barely damaged in the storm. Yet two years after the hurricane only about 1200 units
had been reopened and occupied (Fight to Reopen 2007). The rest remained closed – locked
22 C. Katz

and barricaded, if not totally demolished. Seeing these barely damaged developments
behind chain link fences topped with barbed wire, all of their entryways covered with steel
plates, was one of the most shocking things I saw during my visit to the city. The Bush US
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is opposed to public housing,
favoring vouchers for would-be residents to secure their own private market housing or the
development of ‘mixed-income’ housing, which tends to ‘mix’ at a higher level than most
residents of traditional public housing can afford. Residents and housing activists, among
many others, see a callous and calculated agenda in the continued padlocking of public
housing and lack of response to the needs of former residents. They are not wrong.
The tentacles of hostile privatism are perhaps most obvious around housing. In the
infamous words of Richard Baker, Republican Congressman from Baton Rouge, Katrina
was a godsend: ‘We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it,
but God did.’ And indeed in June 2007 the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO),
which was under HUD receivership even prior to the storm, announced plans to destroy
four of the largest public housing developments in New Orleans. The idea – in keeping
with HUD’s broad agenda – was to replace them with ‘mixed income’ housing (Filosa
2007). At the same time, HUD continued to pursue its voucher logic with residents of
public housing displaced by the storm through its Disaster Voucher Program (DVP).
The DVP provides rental assistance for former residents of public housing to secure
housing, generally private market, wherever they have relocated, taking the meaning of
‘scattered-site’ public housing to a new level. More than 11,000 Gulf area households
were still receiving this ‘temporary’ assistance two years after Katrina, suggesting how
fraught the return home has been (HUD 2007). While public housing residents in New
Orleans have faced obstruction after obstruction to their return, the city’s private rental
market has gone crazy. With so much storm damage, the rental vacancy rate – which,
according to US census figures was 9% before Katrina – neared zero, leading to soaring
rents city-wide. According to the Brookings Institution and the Greater New Orleans
Community Data Center, the fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New
Orleans was 45% higher in summer 2007 than in summer 2005 just before the storm
(Liu and Plyer 2007, 6). In this sort of market there is little incentive to repair or improve
the available housing stock, much of which was in poor condition, and indeed little has
been done. Finally, the federal ‘Road Home’ program, which is intended to provide cash
assistance to those whose homes were damaged by the storm, serves only homeowners and
not renters.7 The shuttering of public housing, the extortionate rental market, and the
limitations of government programs to return people to their homes are even more
troubling when it is remembered that about 55% of the pre-storm population of New
Orleans were renters (see US Census Bureau 2007).
If renters are excluded from compensation when their homes have been destroyed or
damaged, tenants of public housing have been shut out, and private market renters are
facing steep rent increases if not outright rent gouging, while there has been virtual
inaction around the production of ‘affordable housing’, how are people of ‘mixed income’,
to use one of HUD’s favorite terms, supposed to come back and remake New Orleans?
Where are teachers, nurses, waiters, bellhops, taxi drivers, small business owners, police
and firefighters supposed to live? What hope is there for the future of New Orleans as
a working, habitable city as opposed to a theme park if the core of its working population is
essentially evicted? And, of course, the unraveling of the fabric of the city through the
failure to re-house people underscores and perpetuates all of the other problems of
securing the social wage I have been documenting here.
 Gender, Place and Culture 23

Social justice
Finally, at the blurred scale of the municipal, state, and federal governments is another
broken aspect of social reproduction, the legal system. Louisiana has the highest
incarceration rate of any state in the US. More than 173,000 people are in prison in a state
of only 4.5 million (Mann 2006). While 32% of the state’s population is black, the prison
population is 75% black (Mann 2006). The deeply disturbing nature of these problems
preceded Katrina and exceeds the attention I can give it here, but it is important to note the
ways the storm exacerbated an already dire situation. Violent crime has become a fact of
life in New Orleans. In 2006 there were 161 murders in the city, and an astonishing 131 of
the victims were black (Nossiter and Drew 2007). By the middle of October 2007 there
had already been 164 murders in the city (Care Forgot 2007). The legal system was rickety
in the best of times. The public defender’s office, for example, was funded largely through
parking fines (Vann 2006). Before the storm there were only 42 part-time public defenders
for the whole city with its large indigent population. After the storm the staff was vastly
reduced – as were the opportunities to issue parking tickets (Eaton 2006). On the other
side, district attorneys did not fare well either. Most district attorneys in New Orleans earn
about $38,000 – low even for an assistant professor. There is understandably a high
turnover rate in the district attorney’s office, with many inexperienced lawyers cycling
through. Thus, while crime and arrests have increased, the apparatus of justice in the city –
such as it was – has proven limited, faulty, and even incompetent. As a result, large and
growing numbers have been held under grotesque, overcrowded conditions just waiting to
be charged with a crime, to say nothing of their trials or the final disposition of their cases.
About 12% of homicide arrests end in a prison sentence, many of the rest are never
charged with a crime. People now refer to ‘misdemeanor murders’ in the many cases when
the maximum jail time of 60 days elapses before charges are filed, and suspects must be
released (Nossiter and Drew 2007). The intertwined issues of incarceration, legal
representation, and due process in New Orleans are so troubled that many legal scholars
have suggested that they provoke a constitutional crisis. It is not hyperbolic to compare
these incarcerated bodies to those in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to ask serious questions
about human rights, citizenship, representation, and the law.

The crisis of social reproduction

The intertwined issues delineated here – from the physical infrastructure and emergency
management of New Orleans, through the health care, education, and housing systems,
and encompassing the relations and infrastructures of social justice – are all crucial to the
everyday practices and success of social reproduction. They are all the more vital to
recovery and reconstruction in New Orleans. While the storm pushed the limits of these
congeries of practices, aggravating problems affecting all of them, it did not so much
cause the problems as exacerbate ongoing trends in hostile privatism and expose its
corrosive effects. Given the enormous costs and visceral nature of what has been revealed
in the wake of Katrina in New Orleans, it has been shocking to see – and keep seeing –
how limited and lopsided the response of those in power has been.
These conditions of crisis offer many opportunities for intervention with important
political possibilities. Here it is useful to recall the means through which social
reproduction is ensured. Social reproduction is accomplished through the everyday
practices, enduring social relations, and structuring forces associated with the state, the
household, civil society, and capital. The material social forms, practices, and relations
associated with each combine, recombine, complement, and compensate for and with one
24 C. Katz

another in an always-fluid combination. The combined effects of neoliberalism, the

‘warrant for hostile privatism’, devolution, tax rebellion, and anti-unionism over the past
three decades in the US have pushed downward the scale at which social reproduction is
accomplished, to individuals and households, while promoting its privatization. Given the
stubborn gendered division of household labor, these combined processes have relied
heavily on and led to increases in women’s labor. In other words, in New Orleans
following Katrina the very stretched grounds of privatized social reproduction were
strained to their limits – its market logics ripping the social fabric wide open.
These market logics can be seen everywhere. As I have indicated, the government at
all scales – federal, state, and municipal – has cooperated closely with the corporate
community much more so than with labor or the grassroots and residential communities.
At worst, they have pandered to corporate interests in ‘theme parking’, gentrifying, and
whitening New Orleans, as can be seen in the padlocking of public housing and the too
easy recourse to condemning and razing housing in damaged areas of poorer
neighborhoods without giving former residents a chance – let alone any support – to
rebuild their homes, at the same time as resources flow to reconstruct the tourist city of
New Orleans. While the tourist economy is central to the city’s economy, the fact that two
years after the storm 11 of 13 casinos had reopened and were operating at full swing, while
only one of seven hospitals was functioning at pre-storm levels is indicative of skewed
priorities on the part of the state and business (Eaton 2007). The voucher logic associated
with the social wage under neoliberalism is readily apparent everywhere as well. It can
be seen, for instance, in the ready resort to school and housing vouchers, which encourage
people to address their needs individually and through the market rather than through
more social and public means. Corporate interests can also be seen in the union busting
logics that have accompanied recovery and reconstruction in New Orleans. One of
the first acts of the federal government in the wake of Katrina was the suspension of
the depression-era Davis-Bacon Act (since rescinded), allowing workers to be paid sub-
scale wages on federally subsidized construction projects. Likewise, the move toward
charter schools along with the near dismantling of the Orleans Parish School Board was an
effective – and so far lasting – means of sidestepping if not completely busting the once
powerful teachers union in the city (Brenner 2007).
The ‘warrant of hostile privatism’ can be seen everywhere in the banal strategies of
attrition. It is witnessed in the ways the government has stalled on finalizing reconstruction
plans; in the seemingly endless bickering and jockeying among agencies, political parties,
and levels of government – even within a single party; in the uneven geographies of clean-
up and reconstruction brought most clearly to light in the distinctions between the visible
city of tourism and the invisible city of residential deprivation; and in the mundane
practices of disrespect and disregard such as the city’s failure to even replace street
signs destroyed or washed away in many poor neighborhoods so that those intent on
rebuilding might find their way. These policies and practices are as corrosive as they are
symptomatic.

Activisms
These failures – intentional, longstanding, sudden, and accidental – left gaping room for
action. The responses of grassroots and community groups, large donors, religious and
other non-governmental organizations, as well as individuals – neighbors and concerned
people from afar – were extraordinary. Many activities are ongoing. Among the key
groups combining assistance and activism in New Orleans focused on the areas covered
 Gender, Place and Culture 25

here are ACORN, the Common Ground Collective, the Common Ground Clinic, Critical
Resistance, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, People’s Hurricane Relief Fund,
and Safe Streets/Strong Communities, among many, many others. While I cannot address
the specifics of their responses here, I want to note that these groups and their allies have
across the board covered for and to some extent organized around the evacuation of the
state and capital from the work of relief and reconstruction as well as social reproduction
more generally.8 Between them, they have provided free medical care and referrals; tool
exchanges; demolition, clean-up, and reconstruction assistance; housing advice and
assistance; independent oversight of the police department; community support; and
neighborhood reconstruction. At the same time they have advocated for, agitated on behalf
of, and organized around the rights of return for former residents, the inclusion of renters
in Road Home assistance, the clean-up and reopening of public housing, the abolition of
the prison industrial complex, the revamping of Orleans Parish’s notorious Indigent
Defender Board, and various strategies for reconnecting the dispersed communities of
New Orleans and bolstering their means of coping with the extraordinary losses and
displacements they have experienced. These practices have involved these groups in
working against what INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (2007) call ‘the non-
profit industrial complex’, where priorities and modes of practice are set by donors and not
those in need, and ‘accountability’ is a one-way street determined by the funders.
The paternalism of the non-profit industrial complex is in some cases so severe that it
recalls the colonial mindset that has plagued this part of the US south for centuries.
The stink of the sentiment that ‘these people cannot govern themselves’ is no more
palatable coming from NGOs than those previously in power, however well intentioned
they might be. Under the last few decades of capitalist neoliberalism, moreover, these
organizations and their state collaborators have increasingly professionalized their
operations, defanging a lot of activism in the process (see Laurie and Bondi 2005;
INCITE! 2007; South End Press Collective 2007). And if that were not enough, it is deeply
problematic that a small number of organizations absorbed most of the donations
following Katrina. The Red Cross, Salvation Army, United Way, and Bush Clinton
Katrina Fund were among the largest recipients, with the Red Cross outstripping the others
by a long shot, despite their poor track record on getting funds where most needed,
their inefficiency, and their lack of accountability – the very things to which they hold
local organizations strictly answerable. Many have referred to these trends as the
‘Halliburtonization’ of the non-profit sector. George Lipsitz (2006) and others refer to
their actions as ‘legalized looting’, and so it seems to be (cf. Flaherty 2006).
As I talked with activists and learned about some of the activist responses – and the
ugly and troubling social relations and material social practices that call them forth in
New Orleans and elsewhere – I wonder what I can do besides give talks or write things
like this, or write checks, or volunteer to do demolition, clean-up, or reconstruction work
as so many students and others have done. These are not nothing; they’re even useful, but
because of the nature of social reproduction and the multiple terrains of its crises I also
want to do something that goes beyond any particular local. The issues of hostile
privatism and consumer citizenship associated with the neoliberal retreat from the social
wage in all its manifestations are bigger, much bigger, than what is going on in New
Orleans. They are happening all over the world, and they require a translocal and
sustained response. Indeed this perspective is central to the work of all of the
organizations named here.
In other work I have developed the notion of ‘countertopography’ to invoke ‘contour
lines’ that connect disparate places similarly constituted or affected by certain problems
26 C. Katz

(Katz 2001). This sort of political imagination might be called upon here to make
connections among US cities, for example, around poor people’s evictions from the city,
or the school – prison pipeline, or the privatization of security and relief services. Each of
these – and many other possible issues, of course – could link activisms in New Orleans
with other places such as New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and elsewhere.
If activists and their allies could make strategic, practical, and theoretical connections
around particular issues in ways that broaden the effects of their work to organize,
advocate, and agitate, enabling them to share knowledge and resources, we might all get
further with these struggles as we stay closer to home but work further afield. This prospect
had appeal to the activists I met in New Orleans because they were all well aware that the
issues they were addressing were not local or temporary issues of disaster, but of the
sprawling rot that was there all along. Indeed, they were already involved in just this kind
of translocal organizing, and their work was apparent recently when public housing
activists from eight different cities around the country converged at the offices of the
Housing Authority of New Orleans on the second anniversary of Katrina to demand
the preservation and reopening of the city’s public housing. While they actually came
together to protest in New Orleans, each group involved was simultaneously engaged in
similar activism in their own city and had made connections around these struggles.
Working along the ‘contour lines’ of disinvestment and eviction that brought them
together, they demonstrated – in New Orleans and at home – the sort of political
imagination to which ‘countertopography’ aspires.9 This sort of organizing may offer the
chance to produce not just a new and beautiful patchwork dress – to reinvoke the Helen
Hill’s metaphor for New Orleans’s existence and recovery – but perhaps a closetfull,
there, here, and many places in between.

Acknowledgements
I am honored to have written and presented this paper as the Janice Monk Distinguished Visiting
Professor in Feminist Geography. Our field would not be what it is without Jan Monk, and I am
grateful for both her friendship and her support of women in Geography over many years. This
Professorship extends the community of knowledge and learning Jan helped to form, and is a fitting
tribute to her leadership and example. In addition, I appreciate the generous support of Gender, Place
and Culture/Taylor and Francis and the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geography
(RGS/IBG). Thanks especially to John Paul Jones III and Sallie Marston for hosting me at University
of Arizona, and to the audience there and at the Meetings of the RGS/IBG for their critical comments
and suggestions. Sallie also was a fabulous collaborator when she visited New Orleans with me in
early 2007. Thank you to Bikki Tran, Collette Sosnowy, and Elizabeth Housley for research
assistance. I am grateful to Kali Akuno, Christian Roselund, Sue Ruddick, and Susan Saegert for
sharing their work and ideas, and to Brian Marks for sustained engagement on the issues raised here,
and so generously showing Sallie and me around New Orleans, introducing us to activists, and taking
us fishing in the bayou with his family. The comments and questions of audiences at the Dartmouth
Summer Institute on the Futures of American Studies, Queen’s University, and the Ethics, Justice,
Human Rights Plenary at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) meetings in 2006 helped
me shape the paper. My love and thanks to Eric Lott for insisting that I get involved with this work in
the first place, and sharing it all along the way. Finally, I am grateful to Linda Peake for her
extraordinary patience, understanding, and editorial acumen. I am sorry that I managed to derail her
perfect record as an on-time editor on this her last issue – speaking of which, many thanks to Linda
for her wonderful editing of Gender, Place and Culture these past six years.

Notes
1. After eight years at its Central City location, Zeitgeist lost its space in the spring of 2007.
Its lease was not renewed, and condominiums were planned for the location. Zeitgeist was able
 Gender, Place and Culture 27

to secure a great new space in Mid-City, and Tulane University provided it with interim
exhibition and screening space.
2. The population of New Orleans just before Katrina was about 484,000, and more than 200,000
have yet to return. This shocking shrinkage comes on top of the steady population erosion that
began in the 1960s with suburbanization and white flight. New Orleans’s population in 1960 was
about 600,000. It is less than half that now.
3. I should note that while I hold fast to 1973 as a turning point in the broad scale political economy
of social reproduction in the US because of a range of political economic events around then that
I cannot address here, what I have learned from investigating Katrina, and thinking through the
work of Clyde Woods on the Mississippi Delta, Sue Ruddick on diaspora, Anthony Bogues on
Haiti, and Elizabeth Dillon on the early American novel is that many of the grounds and effects
of devolution can be seen in Louisiana across a much longer time span, rooted in and rehearsing
a plantation economy (cf. Bogues n.d.; Dillon 2007; Ruddick forthcoming; Woods 1998).
4. It is interesting to note that the infrastructure around the levee system is one of the only arenas of
social reproduction in which the locus of responsibility has shifted upward over the last century.
In the early years of Louisiana’s development levee construction and maintenance were
the responsibility of property owners. Eventually responsibility for them shifted to the local
government, and ultimately to the federal government where their maintenance was subject to
budget and attention deficits (Kates et al. 2006).
5. When Katrina struck FEMA’s staff was down 20% from its levels during the Clinton
administration, and 80% of its offices were headed by people in ‘acting’ positions.
6. In 2007 a new school superintendent, Paul Vallas, was appointed in New Orleans. Having run
the Chicago and Philadelphia public school systems, he brought enthusiasm and experience to
the position with plans to have the schools operate as community centers open for extended
hours through most of the year and providing children with three meals a day, health and dental
care, and more extensive guidance. He replaced almost all of the principals, re-energized the
truancy system, and hired hundreds of new teachers, thereby reducing class size drastically
(Nossiter 2007). Unlike the start of the school year in 2006, to say nothing of right after the storm
in 2005, the 2007 term seems to hold well placed promise.
7. The ‘Road Home’ program has been notoriously slow in meeting the needs of homeowners
whose homes were destroyed or seriously damaged. By August 2007 more than 180,000
applications had been filed, but only 22% (fewer than 40,000 applicants) had received funds
(Liu and Plyer 2007). If this is how property owners have been treated, the scenario for renters
and homeless people has been far worse.
8. I want to note the important political contradictions raised when grassroots organizations,
individuals, and other community groups cover for the state and capital in the myriad tasks and
social formations of relief, recovery, and reconstruction. In certain ways their – our – stepping
into the breach confirms the neoliberal ethos of privatization, in other ways it reminds of
the radical imperatives of moving beyond the state in accomplishing and altering social
reproduction, and in still other ways it lets the government and corporations off the hook they
should be skewered on. These issues go beyond the purview of this piece as much as they exceed
the crisis provoked by the storm, and I will be attending to them and the work of activist groups
in New Orleans in the next phase of this project. Apart from marking the difficult nature of these
contradictions, I also want to note that the groups I am looking at here and in the next part of this
project are all mindful of and attentive to these issues, and mix organizing and activism with
community assistance and relief.
9. The organizations involved included New York’s Community Voices Heard, Rhode Island’s
Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), Fuerza Unida and Southwest Worker’s
Union from Texas, Georgia’s Project South, and the Labor Community Strategy Center from
California (Public Housing Residents 2007).

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 Gender, Place and Culture 29

ABSTRACT TRANSLATION
Malo elementos: Katrina y el paisaje refregado de la reproducción
social

El huracán Katrina refregó el paisaje polı́tico-económico de Nuevo Orleáns revelando el

efecto de décadas de la malinversión en y el ‘privatismo hostil’ hacia la reproducción
social en una ciudad con desigualdades corrosivas de la clase, la raza, y el género.
El presente artı́culo enfoca en las faltas del estado y del capital en cuestiones de la
reproducción social en la estela de Katrina, y señala las diferentes formas del activismo
que estas faltas han causado. Organizado alrededor de cinco elementos de la reproducción
social, incluyendo la infraestructura del ambiente y de la ayuda, el cuidado médico, la
educación, la vivienda, y la justicia social, el artı́culo argumenta que la ausencia de estos
elementos de la seguridad social creó las condiciones que hicieron que Katrina fuese un
desastre y que frustraron la respuesta a la destrucción social, económica, y fı́sica creado
por la tormenta en Nuevo Orleáns. Los gastos se pueden ver más obviamente en la
desigualdad de la recuperación de los barrios y la infraestructura, en la dificultad de
reestablecer una población estable de residentes debido a la falta de apoyo para los
trabajadores y sus familias lo cual afecta especialmente a las mujeres y a los padres
solitarios, y en la profundización de varias tendencias neoliberales hacia la privatización
de la educación, del cuidado médico, y de la vivienda. Tomando en cuento las cuestiones
de la clase, el género, y la raza que subrayan estas condiciones, se consideran los
movimientos sociales comunitarios que trabajan para reparar esta situación, e se
interrogan las polı́ticas subyacentes – explı́citas e implı́citas – que han producido esta
situación.

Palabras claves: reproducción social; huracán Katrina; Nuevo Orleáns; activismo;

neoliberalismo