Misfit medicine and queer geographies: The diverse economy and politics of cannabis in carceral Los Angeles

Abstract

Fundamentally shaped by queer and trans activism and labor, Los Angeles’ cannabis markets offer an opportunity to understand how “diverse economies,” as defined by Gibson-Graham, are dynamic, contingent political projects that require contending with power and difference. With data from nearly four years of ethnographic observation and 70-plus interviews, I analyze how numerous Black, Latinx, Native, and Asian and Pacific Islander queer women and transgender economic actors in cannabis have developed labor relations, collective institutional forms, and reciprocal exchange to make cannabis dispensaries a space of care and solidarity. Starting with AIDS crisis-era medical marijuana activism, queer economic actors have built affective relations at the scale of the body with patients, owners, and each other in ways that transcend profit imperatives and bridge across difference. More recently, in the face of economic exclusion and the pervasive gendered division of intimate labor, queer and trans workers of color have turned to the body as a scaffolding for collective action across scales. Drawing from resurgent social movement unionism in the region, they have led intersectional campaigns to protect more-than-capitalist elements of the industry and challenge the carceral state’s drug war. Bridging feminist economic and political geography allows insight to the spatially and temporally contingent nature of diverse, queer economies and their embedding in broader relations of racial, carceral, and homonormative capitalism. At the same time, such an approach centering the active politics of diverse economies surfaces the potentialities for multi-scalar movements to develop and sustain alternatives to capitalism.