Affective governance among street-involved women and their services providers

ABSTRACT

Affect modulates and directs the governance of street prostitution in encounters between street-involved women and their social services and healthcare providers through three nodes on a circuit of affect. The first is the street, constituting a set of geographic and psycho-social phenomena that exert a formative and often intergenerational impact on street-involved women’s lives. The second, selfhood, connects an understanding of trauma as inhibitory to cognitive development with the governmentality of mental health diagnoses. The third, embodied abjection, links the physical states and practices connected with addiction, homelessness, incarceration, and other forms of social suffering, with street-involved women’s abjection.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective governmentality
• social services
• street prostitution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For this article we cite from interviews conducted as part of the larger research project and use abbreviations to indicate participant’s profession as follows: social services provider (SSP), healthcare provider (HCP), or street-involved women (P1). Each includes a number (such as P1, P2) to indicate the transcript number and for some participants the year of interview is also included eg (P1 2005).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported through various small grants funded by the University of Wyoming.

Notes on contributors

Susan Dewey

Feminist criminologist Susan Dewey is author or lead editor of 11 books and nearly 100 papers and government reports on the intersections between poverty, violence, and criminal justice systems. She is Professor and Director of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming and co-founder and coordinator of the national award-winning college-in-prison program, Wyoming Pathways from Prison.

Jennifer Hankel

Jennifer Hankel has an M.A. in International Human Rights from Denver University where she served as the Associate Director of Research for the Human Trafficking Center. She has worked as a program evaluator and organizational capacity building coach for Mile High United Way and currently leads Denver’s Child Welfare Program, Evaluation and Development team and is part-time research consultant for the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

Kyria Brown

Kyria Brown is an MA student at the University of Denver Graduate of Social Work and the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado-Anschutz campus. She is interested in the support systems of street-involved women during their mothering experiences and plans to pursue a doctoral degree in social work.