Makes me mad. The Fed Up Honeys investigate stereotypes, gentrification, and the disinvestment of the Lower East Side (New York City)

Disrupting stereotypical profiles that fix young women of color in a particular location ("at risk" in the 'inner city'), six young women (the Fed Up Honeys) engage the "culture wars," through "a collective struggle for interpretative power" (Pratt, 1999) in a participatory action research project entitled "Makes Me Mad: Stereotypes of young urban women of color" (www.fed-up-honeys.org). My dissertation focuses on the methodological and theoretical contributions of this project and follows its lead, tracing the connections between representations of young working class women of color and the disinvestment and gentrification of the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City. In my analysis I consider the critical role of representations in legitimating contradictions of urban economic restructuring and neoliberal spatial politics. In turn, I consider how young women negotiate, accommodate, and challenge deficit stereotypes while constructing their subjectivities through a participatory action research project.; My analysis addresses some of the radical possibilities of participatory and collaborative research. Not only did the young women involved transform themselves, but they also pushed scholarship in new directions, questioning old assumptions, and engaging the contradictions of their everyday lives. Through the process of comparing each others' personal experiences the young women collectively developed 'new' subject positions and a narrative framework that contests the discourses of risk, which construct young working class women of color as a "burden to society" and questions the valuation of the economic over their personal well-being. To this end, the Fed Up Honeys challenge sociospatial policies and practices that produce inequality in their neighborhood and the broader context of their everyday lives, effectively reframing the public conversation about gentrification and urban economic restructuring.