Include to exclude: necropolitical surveillance in biopolitical spaces for sex workers who use drugs in British Columbia

Abstract

This paper will reveal that supportive housing—a type of subsidized housing with on-site medical support and services—is a space geared toward the circulation of otherized populations, specifically focusing on overdose risks and structural violence that sex workers who use drugs in these arrangements experience. Drawing on Mbembe's necropolitics and supporting works, this analysis will understand supportive housing to be an everyday death world that disguises necropolitical weapons with biopolitical aims. Supportive housing in British Columbia attempts to deploy various surveillance techniques and coercive housing rules in response to the drug toxicity crisis, in part to curtail overdose deaths. For sex workers who use drugs, a population overrepresented among people who experience homelessness, drug use, and overdose risk, the presence of such surveillance strategies exacerbates the very public-health crises that supportive housing purports to address. The existence of visual surveillance, threats of violence, and police presence, among other things, works either to spatially isolate sex workers within supportive housing arrangements or displace them to the streets—all increasing their chances of overdose and trauma. The necropolitical framework will help to reconcile the simultaneous presence of both inclusion and exclusion. Through the recapturing of biopolitical spaces like supportive housing, the presence of necropolitical weapons will subject sex workers to slow death, whether or not they choose to exist under its surveillance. A failure not only to address public health concerns but to intensify them reveals the more nefarious attempt of the state to utilize supportive housing as a site of control to exclude otherized populations from the public sphere and take part in their elimination. This paper concludes that public health regimes commonly understood to be matters of the biopolitical can be recaptured to perpetuate harm rather than mitigate it. Death worlds will then be understood not to be limited to more obvious sites of violence or by their physical bounds, allowing them to permeate less obvious spaces that uniquely target otherized populations.