Synopses & Reviews
For the addicted, pregnant, and poor women living in daily-rent hotels in San Franciscoand#39;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 womenandrsquo;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 womenand#39;s lives and describes how they must navigate the tension between pregnancyand#39;s demands to stay clean and the pull of addiction and poverty toward drug use and sex work. By creating the space for addicted womenand#39;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.and#160;and#160;
Review
andquot;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.andquot;and#160;
Review
andquot;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 and#39;realand#39; and complicated. addicted.pregnant.poor brings the experience of pregnant drug addicts close to the reader, giving them human voices, faces, and fears. Knightand#39;s plunge into the dangerous, barely survivable world these women inhabit is tremendously compelling.andquot;
Synopsis
In this ethnography of addicted, pregnant, and poor women living in daily-rent hotels in San Francisco, Kelly Ray Knight examines the myriad struggles these women face, as well as their encounters with social and medical institutions. She asks: what kinds of futures are possible for these women?
About the Author
Kelly Ray Knight is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.and#160;