An ethnographic portrait of extremely marginalized, drug-using, & pregnant women living in daily-rent hotels. Knight asks “What forms of life are possible here?,” in reference to the women she profiles, their developing pregnancies, and the forms of professionalized, expert help enlisted in their rehabilitation. The text involves a detailed account of the complex daily lives of women SRO occupants as they navigate a variety of institutional fields. Knight aims to speak back to the incomplete, inconsistent, & inaccurate representations of the lives of addicted, pregnant, & poor women as they are depicted in public policy, the scientific imagination, popular culture, & service providers. .Knight interrogates the current state (or lack) of knowledge regarding addiction, mental illness, & "socially condoned motherhood” in the U.S. Her argument is with whether or not the constraints faced by these women- & their children- are so contradictory, & so acute, that they preempt the very possibility of survival. Knight shares potential consequences of the politically charged decisions she makes in both serving and representing her subjects, as she executes her dual roles as researcher and service provider. The voices of the mothers feature prominently throughout the text, along with the perspectives of individuals &institutions tasked with making truth claims about Knight’s research subjects. The perspectives of public health epidemiologists, community advocates, policymakers, treatment professionals, social service bureaucrats, & social scientists are all included. Knight highlights the problematic distances between the realities of daily life for her subjects, the knowledge claims produced by mental health & epidemiological experts, & the interventions designed to address the women’s suffering. Knight begins her narrative with an examination of her subjects’ near-constant state of anxiety regarding moment-to-moment needs for housing, food, drugs, & safety. The city’s conceptualization of SROs as a housing ‘solution’ for women who are not often sole occupants is contradictory, in that routine public health research on SROs does not often account for ‘visiting’ sex work patrons, cohabiting partners, future infants, or women’s desires to regain custody of their children in state care. She considers the overlapping & contradictory temporal anchorings pregnant and addicted SRO residents are subject to: “addict time, hotel time, pregnancy time, jail time, treatment time, epidemiological time, biomedical time, memorial time, and life time." Temporal conflicts provide a powerful alternative to explain an addicted mothers’ seemingly ‘disorganized’ behavior. Policy shifts ensure that while mental illness remains a recognized basis for claims to public resources, addiction was excluded, further complicating truth & entitlement claims. Entanglements of ‘underlying’ mental illness & substance use, obscures a holistic understanding for treatment & service professionals. The mania-inducing impact of unstable housing, the cumulative impact of trauma exposures, & the experience of pregnancy serve to complicate symptomatic presentations, diagnostic possibilities, & resource eligibility. Knight examines the inherent tensions between rehabilitation & punishment, coercion & care, fetal rights &mothers’ rights, criminality & victimhood, & the independent, discerning, rational, & self-governing neoliberal subject versus the state-dependent, drug-addicted, ‘welfare queen.’ The theme of ‘risk’ is considered from both neo-Marxist & Foucauldian perspectives. Knight suggests both play an important role in understanding the inconsistency of her subjects’ as both victim & criminal. Providers use coercive & punitive state apparatuses, as well as bureaucratic discretion in resource allocation & rule-bending, to work towards ameliorating the women's suffering, as they are viewed simultaneously as both victims and perpetrators. ‘Risk’ is considered in the context of the pregnancies themselves, in providers’ attempts to intervene, & in womens lives (marked by marginalization, gentrification, sexual & physical violence, a low-wage economy so untenable & inhumane as to compel sex work) as they try & often fail to represent themselves as self-governing. Most significantly,Knight interrogates risk by asking whether statistical & biomedical renderings of addicted, pregnant, & poor women somehow work to normalize the inevitable human suffering &loss of life in contemporary urban spaces that results from market fundamentalism & neoliberal policy shifts. She provides a sophisticated portrait of the dire consequences of her subjects’ experiences with multiple & conflicting temporal logics. Audiences with potential interest in Knight’s work include researchers from a number of disciplines studying urban marginalization; homelessness/housing insecurity; violence & the cultural ‘genealogy’ of trauma; drug addiction; public health; the politics of motherhood, reproduction, & natalism; disability/mental health; students taking advanced undergraduate or graduate seminars in medical anthropology, law & policy, urban anthropology, crime, & public health. A good portion of the text is written accessibly enough to benefit & appeal to service providers who may have contact with similar populations.

ISBN: 9780822359968