| This dissertation is focused around a singular ethnographic question which engages both science studies and critical medical anthropology: What happens when the socially dead reproduce?;Homeless, pregnant, drug-addicted women embody a specific form of social death in the urban American landscape. Their interactions with institutions, everyday lives and drug use foreclose future possibilities; their unborn children represent a site of critical intervention to ensure the production of a healthy life from a diseased one. The irrationality of the pregnant addict is re-interpolated through emergent scientific claims about addiction as a "brain disease" and the increasing diagnosis of bi-polar disorder to contain both the mania and depression of traumatized homeless women. Epidemiologists and clinicians -- "category makers" -- must document behavior, blood and urine to substantiate diagnoses that count, those which translate into monetary and social capital. Mental health bureaucrats -- "neurocrats" -- are charged with processing pregnant addicts' claims for social legibility, tapping institutions to gain access to public dollars and a room inside. Women who cannot, or refuse to, meet diagnostic criteria are left to circulate in predatory and violent drug-sex economies. Without social legibility, these pregnant addicts negotiate daily life and income generation with the "protocapitalists", hotel manager pimps to whom women become indebted for shelter. The medical anthropologist -- an "info-vulture" -- struggles to make sense of it all by self-reflectively analyzing the logics of science, bureaucracy, and the streets.;How these key figures -- the pregnant addict, the category maker, the neurocrat, the protocapitalist, and the info-vulture - position their narratives relative to the reproduction of social death becomes a question of evidence. As the story of the pregnant, homeless, drug-addicted woman travels from the street - to the lab - to the policy maker's desk, she is reconstituted. When the socially dead reproduce we are all morally implicated. We seek to produce and digest evidence that explains both the death and its reproduction. |
