abandoned women
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__ _ _ _ _ _ THE 2005 AAG ANTIPODE LECTURE Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception Geraldine Pratt Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, Canad a, V6T 1Z2; email: gpratt@geog .ubc.ca I consider two cases of legal abandonment in Vancouver—of murdered sex workers and live-in caregiv ers on tempora ry work visas—i n light of Agamben ’s claim that the generali zed suspension of the law has become a dominant paradigm of government. I bring to Agamben’s theory a con cern to speci fy both the gen deri ng and racia li satio n of the se pr oce sses, and the man y geographies that are integral to legal abandonment and the reduction of categories of people to ‘bare life’. The case studies also allow me to explore two limit-concepts that Agamben offers as a means to re-envision political community: the refugee who refuses assimilation in the nation- state, and the human so degraded as to exist beyond conventional humanist ethics of respect, dignity and responsi bility . Wo me n be gan to go mi ssing from the Do wn town Eastside in Vancouve r in 1978. The media and the police were oddly inattentive. It was not until 1998—roughly 69 murders later—that they began to pay attention. Subsequently, the DNA of 31 women has been identified on a suburban Vancouver property, and the owner has been charged with their mur- ders and curre ntly awa its tria l. Vancouver’s Missin g Wome n, as the y are now called, have finally and fully captured the public imagination. In January of 2004, for instance, artist Kati Campbell exhibited an installa- tion called 67 Shawls. The artist had laboriously embroidered text onto 67 shawls; each shawl memorializes one missing woman, and each was to be delivered to a missing woman’s mother when the exhibit closed. Yet, at the moment that Campbell’s shawls were being displayed, a new case involving women in the Downtown Eastside came to light. Another Vancouver man was found to have brutally assaulted an astonishing number of women in the same neighbourhood (Vancouver Sun 2004) 1 . He had video recorded 12 of these assaults, which was a convenience of sorts for the Vancouver police. My research with domestic workers in Vancouver calls attention to this same uncanny incapacity on the part of the state to regulate and police certain types of violence and illegal behaviour. In 1995 I began working with women who have come from the Philippines on tem- porary work visas to care for middle class Canadian children in their Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.
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