Necropolitics in the “Compassionate” City: Care/Brutality in San Francisco

ABSTRACT

In San Francisco in the United States, the urban precariat is governed simultaneously by two logics of intervention that are highly contradictory: compassion and brutality. In this article, I explore the contours of violence embedded in humanitarian governance for unstably housed/homeless women who use drugs as they navigate care systems for their health and well-being. I use Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to examine how women embody an anticipation of death, at the same time as they manage their risk for actual death in engagements with care in a city paradoxically known for its progressive, compassionate principles of intervention for those who are most marginalized.

KEYWORDS:

• United States of America
• care
• drug use
• governance
• healthcare
• necropolitics

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the women who participated in this research and shared their time, space, and stories of survival with me. I am also grateful to the network of activists, advocates, and frontline providers who work tirelessly on health and social justice issues related to the War on Drugs.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico and the National Institutes on Drug Abuse. My time conducting this research was also supported, in part, by a California HIV/AIDS Research Program Grant, through collaboration with the Principal Investigator Kelly Knight at the University of California, San Francisco.

Notes on contributors

Andrea M. López

Andrea M. López is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. Her forthcoming book is entitled States of Emergency: The Politics of Death and Deservingness for People Who Use Drugs.