Sif Ingibergsdottir Mogensen

Research on drug use and housing insecurity among women has revealed experiences of violence, stigma, anxiety, emotional displacement, and ontological insecurity. Despite this, there is limited research on the affective dynamics that influence women's experiences with drug use and housing insecurity. This study is based on 170 hours of participant observation at two harm reduction services in Denmark and includes 29 qualitative interviews with women utilizing those services. Drawing on Ahmed's concept of “happy objects,” this article critically explores how the embodied and emotional experiences of women who use drugs regarding housing and houselessness are shaped by societal ideals, values, and objects associated with a “good” and “happy” life. The analysis demonstrates that housing is not simply viewed as a “happy” or “unhappy” object by the women in this study. For many participants, the hope that housing would lead to a better life was often undermined by their social relations, challenges in creating and maintaining a home, poverty and deprivation, and the structural constraints of the Danish welfare system. While the hope for secure housing persisted, their experiences with houselessness, drug use, and structural vulnerability were imbued with feelings of fear, shame, and alienation. Many women cycled between housing and houselessness, frequently returning to harm reduction services, which intensified their ambivalent feelings of these spaces. Based on these findings, this study argues that housing strategies and harm reduction services are entangled and should be understood as interdependent in order to best capture the lived realities of women who use drugs.

In this paper, we build on literature examining care practices in harm reduction services to investigate some of the reasons why women who use drugs access, remain in or leave harm reduction services. Through the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork collected at two Danish harm reduction services, including 29 interviews with women who use drugs, this study examines how care is practised in these services, what conditions these practices and how women are affected by this care. Our findings indicate that care is enacted in material, social and affective practices and relations, including the provision of everyday necessities, bodily affection and staff expressions of concern and sympathy that promote belonging. However, these care practices are also conditioned by relations of control mediated by workplace factors, the impacts of national and organisational policies including ongoing resourcing challenges, staff understanding of care practices and intersecting dynamics of gender, ethnicity and class. Women's experiences of harm reduction services are mediated by their everyday struggles negotiating relations of care and control with significant implications for both the quality of care delivered in these sites and its impacts. We close by reflecting on the tensions between care and control in harm reduction programmes for women.