Righteous Dopefiend

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2008

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 6 Summary: “Parenting”

Most of the people in Edgewater have children, and this chapter delves into the experiences of several of the main interlocutors as parents facing homelessness and addiction. As we learned in the fourth chapter, “Childhood,” the families and children of white interlocutors shun them, while Black interlocutors are likely to have intermittent contact with their families and children. The cycle of abuse detailed in Chapter 4 continues, as some interlocutors talk proudly about the patriarchal abuse they inflicted on their wives, girlfriends, and children. Exploring this violence, Bourgois and Schonberg determine that the cycle of abuse continues not “as blind, imitative behavior, but rather as a resource for making order in the world. It is rewarded by prevailing cultural values that pass for common sense and for universal ethics,” (218-219).

Through Tina, the ethnographic team explores themes of motherhood in the context of addiction. This close, personal journey through Tina’s experiences of motherhood while struggling against wider structural and institutional forces, such as a rapidly decreasing social safety net leading up to and during the Reagan era, gives the reader an intimate understanding of the ways American socio-cultural values are still alive and well in the Edgewater community. The Edgewater population struggles to reconcile their position in society with what they consider to be the ideal; often, their separation from their offspring is a means of ending the cycle of abuse that they were brought up in.

Chapter 6 Analysis

Chapter 6 continues to explore the intimate, personal effects of Politically and Institutionally Structured Violence, this time by considering the roles of many of the Edgewater residents as parents. The chapter builds on what readers have previously learned about the relationships, childhoods, and money-making endeavors of the main interlocutors to better understand the underlying conditions that shape their approach to parenting.

As Sal continues a cycle of patriarchal violence, he is also reacting against a social system that has deprived him of meaningful ways to fulfill the patriarchal role he has been raised to expect of himself. As with several other male interlocutors, physical abuse becomes a means of asserting patriarchal dominance within the family despite feeling powerless in the wider world. Meanwhile, Tina struggles against a system that vilifies mothers more than fathers for substance use. The social expectation that mothers should be flawless embodiments of care and nurturing means that mothers with substance use disorders face far harsher criticism than fathers, further evidence of the role of Gender and Sexuality in Poverty, Homelessness, and Addiction. The author’s interviews with Tina and other unhoused parents give the reader tangible examples of how policies and institutions that subscribe to neoliberal ideals impact lives, moving funding away from the social welfare system to allow free market forces to operate with less restriction. Chapter 6 illustrates the resulting devastation to families living in poverty, who face discrimination based on race, socioeconomic status, and gender because free market sources depend on such inequality to maintain the competition that marks a neoliberal, capitalist system.