Scars, Harm and Pain

Abstract

The practice of being injected by others is one social vector that promotes a higher vulnerability to HIV among injector drug using (IDU) women. This paper suggests that this practice can be interpreted as a strategy used by these women to avoid the bodily damage caused by muscle injection, and thus to reduce its political and economic consequences. Abscesses and scars that are more frequent with muscle injection lead to further subordination within the hierarchies of their social networks, and deteriorate the women's precarious strategies of income production. Although being injected by another increases the probability of HIV infection, it simultaneously prevents the visible physical damage that subjects these women to greater vulnerability. In the street ideology of this network the moral devaluation arising from the bodily damage implies a moral anatomy that reproduces in this setting the politics of self-care that dominate in mainstream society. This local practice was studied through interviews of Latina IDU women and ethnographic immersion into a social network of drug consumption in the Mission District, San Francisco, California.