The Intimate Entrenchment of Philadelphia's Drug War

Abstract

The 'war on drugs' has been an important discursive and juridical tool for maintaining a spatialized order in the city. Scholars have gone to great lengths to document the victimization and exploitation of this war's 'victims' – primarily black and brown young men in cities across the globe. While applying a spatial analytic to understand the global effects of the 'war on drugs', it is also necessary to attend to the drug economy's situated, micro-practices of territory, politics, and governance. This paper contributes such an understanding by applying a feminist and urban geopolitical frame to understand the intimate practices of the drug war in US inner cities. It draws from a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories collected in Grays Ferry, Philadelphia, and offers a discursive analysis of local newspapers and policy documents to understand the framing of Grays Ferry as the front line of the 'war on drugs'. Through such a framing the city block becomes a site of contestation as the spaces targeted by the drug war also serve as spaces of survival for residents. Through a feminist analysis of the city block, I demonstrate the resistance to the drug war is a fight for survival by residents.