Righteous Dopefiend

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2008

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Male Love”

To explore relationships between men in the population Bourgois and Schonberg are engaging, this chapter opens with a focus on Petey and Hank. Though they express explicitly anti-gay attitudes—as does nearly everyone in the community—Petey and Hank have a deeply intimate partnership that, while not necessarily sexual, would cause them to be read in most mainstream contexts as a gay couple. Such arrangements between “running partners” are common in the community. Their relationship forms during the research period after Petey’s previous running partner dies of an overdose. Hank took Petey under his wing, and he speaks about him in terms that the researchers describe as “almost chivalrous.”

US institutions affect romantic relations among the men primarily through the legal system. Law enforcement negatively affects all of the interlocutors through violent disruption, which escalates their already vulnerable situation to more desperate levels and carries grave consequences to their health. The anthropologists posit that because their interlocutors are considered lumpen, a term they use for people on the very fringes of society, shifts in societal pressures and public health messaging take longer to reach them. As policies criminalize homelessness, Petey and Hank’s situation becomes precarious. The constant disruption of their lives causes them to take greater risks and have close to zero access to social services such as clean needle exchange programs. The harm being done by law enforcement and the legal system is often in direct conflict with public health and social services. As Hank and Petey’s health severely declines due to their being constantly driven out of their camps, losing everything they have, Hank becomes a “frequent flyer” at the county hospital, where he gets state-of-the-art care—but the police confiscate his medication after he is released. Petey and Hank oscillate between intensive care and the street, and the shortcomings of public health and wider social services become increasingly evident as they grow more and more sick.

Chapter 7 Analysis

In a further consideration of Gender and Sexuality in Poverty, Homelessness, and Addiction, the researchers describe Petey and Hank’s relationship as an intense homosocial bond—one that bears all the hallmarks of romantic intimacy with the exception of sex. Such relationships are common in the Edgewater community despite the anti-gay biases that are also prevalent there. Neoliberal policies have made severe cuts to public health and social services providing necessities to indigent populations, and these intensely bonded relationships are one means by which people support each other in the absence of support from the state. By putting “class into the center of Foucault’s understanding of subjectivity in order to explore the congruence of homosocial masculine love among homophobic men,” (349), the authors connect this phenomenon to lumpen subjectivity: People living on the fringes of society, are more likely to have transgressive relationships and less likely to subscribe to biopower messaging. Under Foucault’s theory of biopower, adopted by the authors, the state promotes heterosexual relationships and stigmatizes or even criminalizes LGBTQ+ relationships because the former produce more citizens—that is, workers—for the state. Because biopower does not serve the people of Edgewater, it holds less power over their choices.

The second facet of Chapter 7 builds upon the fact that the “institutional budget crisis for social services for the poor occurred in the context of one of the most rapid accumulations of regional and personal wealth in US history,” (264). This vast discrepancy between societal wealth and institutional poverty is evidence of Politically and Institutionally Structured Violence. The state chooses what it wants to spend its money on, and by choosing to starve social services of the resources needed to help impoverished people, the state is committing violence against those in need. By following two interlocutors who are in a relationship as they navigate life-threatening illness and systems that do not help them get well, the authors use a personal and intimate story to illustrate vast, systemic problems. This part of the book contrasts everyday violence with political and institutional violence, bringing the stories of the interlocutors to the forefront before explaining why the hospital is doing such a poor job treating them and why they wait until they are severely ill to get help.