A Users’ Guide to ‘Juice Bars’ and ‘Liquid Handcuffs’

Abstract

The contested space of addiction treatment is a space of intersections and inscriptions, a space where the biopolitics of treatment practice meets strategies of sociospatial stigmatization projected by the surrounding community. Drawing from a case study of community conflict surrounding the relocation of a methadone clinic into Corktown, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on the peripheries of downtown Toronto, this articles explores the sociospatial dimensions of addiction treatment through a theoretical and ethnographic investigation of client impressions regarding the space of the methadone clinic, before and after its relocation into Corktown. Examining clients’ engagement with the space of the clinic as a series of body–space “assemblages” and “folds,” this analysis reveals the clinic as an inherently social space, where clients negotiate both the fluid strategies of biopolitical control implicated in treatment practice, and strategies of sociospatial stigmatization in order to assert and articulate their “right to the city.”

Keywords

methadone sociospatial stigmatization addiction treatment the body biopolitics

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