Full Description
For the addicted, pregnant, and poor women living in daily-rent hotels in San Francisco's Mission district, life is marked by battles against drug cravings, housing debt, and potential violence. In this stunning ethnography Kelly Ray Knight presents these women in all their complex humanity and asks what kinds of futures are possible for them given their seemingly hopeless situation. During her four years of fieldwork Knight documented women's struggles as they traveled from the street to the clinic, jail, and family court, and back to the hotels. She approaches addicted pregnancy as an everyday phenomenon in these women's lives and describes how they must navigate the tension between pregnancy's demands to stay clean and the pull of addiction and poverty toward drug use and sex work. By creating the space for addicted women's own narratives and examining addicted pregnancy from medical, policy, and social science perspectives, Knight forces us to confront and reconsider the ways we think about addiction, trauma, health, criminality, and responsibility.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Consumption and Insecurity 33
2. Addicted Pregnancy and Time 68
3. Neurocratic Futures in the Disability Economy 102
4. Street Psychiatrics and New Configurations of Madness 125
5. Stratified Reproduction and the Kin of Last Resort 151
6. Victim-Perpetrators 178
Conclusion 206
Appendix 240
Notes 247
Bibliography 279
Index 297
