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.
ISBN-13: 9780822359968
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 10-27-2015
Pages: 320
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.67(d)
Series: Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography
Kelly Ray Knight is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
What People are Saying About This
Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America - Rayna Rapp
"Kelly Ray Knight writes with compassion and self-reflection, and one of her great strengths is the way she gracefully renders her own doubts and self-ironies into the stories she collects from pregnant addicts, making both her subjects and herself more 'real' and complicated. addicted.pregnant.poor brings the experience of pregnant drug addicts close to the reader, giving them human voices, faces, and fears. Knight's plunge into the dangerous, barely survivable world these women inhabit is tremendously compelling."
Righteous Dopefiend - Philippe Bourgois
"Kelly Ray Knight has the courage to expose eloquently and ethnographically one of the most painful public secrets of addiction and urban poverty (and gentrification) that medicine, public health, science, and society cannot solve. What this book documents ethnographically and explores theoretically must be confronted in all its impossible complexity and violence."
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Table of 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
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