Neurocratic Futures in the Disability Economy

This chapter offers an analysis of the temporalities that mattered most for addicted, pregnant women. Everyday physical realities (of hunger, drug withdrawal, and pregnancy), social interactions, and institutional involvements pulled women into and out of different temporalities. And at all times, the clock was ticking as women moved ever closer to inevitable collisions with medical and carceral institutions. The temporalities impacting women’s experiences of pregnancy and addiction were: addict time, hotel time, pregnancy time, jail time, treatment time, epidemiological time, biomedical time, memorial time, and life time. The relationship between multiple temporalities and women’s meaning-making elucidated their social roles as pregnant women in their everyday lives and the technocratic adjudication of their mothering potential. The personal, the social, and the biomedical were made temporal, through symbolic practices of recording time as rent paid, drugs taken, children documented in photographs, surveys completed, and time served.