The Pornography of AddictionThe Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande. By Angela Garcia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Abstract

ulation.” The final chapter centers on how the women are assessed by clinic personnel. This is a counterpoint to the earlier discussion of the role that physicians’ views play in designating the pregnant Medicaid patient’s body as polluted, for nonmedical personnel view them as “wily cheats and welfare queens.” This ethnography does almost everything that a compelling ethnography should do, yet it would have been useful to consider the neoliberal context in which racialization and surveillance of the pregnant body occurs. Consideration of neoliberalism would have broadened Bridges’s analytic frame to interrogate race and reproduction in this context and to cast a net over yet another way in which citizenship is compromised. Additionally, the issue of choice is provoked in this text, not only by virtue of the fact that the women seem to have little of it but also in terms of the meaning of choice in a neoliberal context. But Reproducing Race does an excellent job of exploring the profound incoherence of a poor pregnant woman’s experience at Alpha Hospital. It reveals the ways in which the uninsured are constructed as unruly and consequently receive a regime of medical care that medicalizes poverty. The institutional entanglements, that is, the circumstance of being controlled through state-sanctioned service provision, result in both monitoring performance and assessing deficits. While Bridges’ ethnography represents a major contribution to Black Critical Theory, this groundbreaking work should be widely read in anthropology, medical training, public health, social work, gender studies, African American studies, and critical medical studies, and by policymakers.