Between Suffering & Salvation: Hypermarginality and the Brutalities of Care in the Compassionate City of San Francisco. 

Presentation by Andrea Lopez

In San Francisco, people experiencing homelessness, addiction, trauma, and acute physical and mental health needs engage with care in various realms—such as social services and safety net medical care—as a matter of daily survival. However, in the urban spaces of deprivation, police officers also become uniquely implicated in a “care assemblage”—a constellation of interventions into the daily, street-based health and mental health crises of the homeless and unstably housed. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with hypermarginalized women in two neighborhoods, I examine how frontline police officers inhabit a hybrid role, enacting punitive oppression and compassionate redemption upon women involved in drug use and sex work. I argue that the way this phenomenon plays out ethnographically points to deeper ontological configurations regarding the indistinct boundaries between suffering and salvation for the most marginalized women, which reproduce health inequities.