______________________ _____________________________

THE 2005 AAG ANTIPODE LECTURE

Abandoned Women and Spaces of the

Exception
Geraldine Pratt
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC,
Canada, V6T 1Z2; email: gpratt@geog.ubc.ca

I consider two cases of legal abandonment in Vancouver—of murdered sex workers and live-in
caregivers on temporary work visas—in light of Agamben’s claim that the generalized suspension
of the law has become a dominant paradigm of government. I bring to Agamben’s theory a
concern to specify both the gendering and racialisation of these processes, and the many
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 responsibility.

Women began to go missing from the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver

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 currently awaits trial. Vancouver’s Missing Women, as they 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

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1053

homes. This was an exciting time to start this research because, after
years of lobbying, activists were finally beginning to exact some sig-
nificant legislative reforms. In 1995 in British Columbia, for instance,
the Employment Standards Act was amended so that live-in domestic
workers were covered by minimum hourly wage and overtime regula-
tions from which they previously had been excluded. However, almost
a decade after these legislative reforms, local activists think that the
situation of live-in domestic workers in Vancouver has worsened. The
state has neglected to enforce the new regulations, and many live-in
caregivers are working longer hours under even more exploitative
conditions. The Director of the Philippine Women Centre argues
that it is now harder to organize domestic workers than it was in
1995, precisely because domestic workers work longer hours than they
did before the new labour regulations were put in place. A decade
ago, domestic workers used to gather together at the Philippine
Women Centre on weekends; now, desperate phone calls come into
the Centre on an individual, emergency basis. In the Director’s words,
every phone call is ‘‘as if they’re calling 911.’’2
The reference to ‘911’ is ironic because this is the telephone number
that is used in Canada to connect a caller to emergency state services.
Yet it is precisely the inadequacy of state regulation that leads live-in
domestic workers to place emergency calls to the Philippine Women
Centre. I want to pursue this issue of absences and lapses in state
policing and regulation in particular spaces of the city. Rather than
viewing such lapses as aberrations from normal practice, I want to ask
how such irregularities become the norm for certain people in certain
places. This raises, in the context of everyday life in Vancouver, a
paradox that Foucault identified for the modern biopolitical state. The
paradox is that there is a positive relation between the state’s assurances
of life (eg, protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens, as well as the
health of the nation), and the state’s right to kill: ‘‘the more you kill [and]
. . . let die, the more you will live’’ (quoted in Stoler 1995:84). The
relation between the production of citizenship and the state’s sovereignty
over life is therefore not incidental but productive and fundamental.
I pursue this paradox by means of Giorgio Agamben’s theorizing of the
state of exception. I bring to Agamben’s theory a concern to specify the
gendering and racialisation of these processes. As a feminist frustrated by
both the everyday violence exacted on certain categories of women and
the seeming inability to reform the Live-in Caregiver Program, I turn to
Agamben’s theory for fresh ideas about political strategy.

Suspending the Law

According to Agamben, what most characterizes modern biopolitics is
the generalized suspension of the law—the state of exception—as a

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basis of liberal sovereignty. In his book Homo Sacer, Agamben theo-

rises this sovereign ban through the example of ancient Roman law
and the figure of homo sacer, a legal designation for one who was
excluded by and from juridical law.3 The possibility of suspending the
law allows the elimination ‘‘of entire categories of citizens who for
some reason cannot be integrated into the political system’’ (2005:2).
Such people are rendered as bare life and legally abandoned.
Abandonment is not equivalent to exclusion. It has a more complex
topological relation of being neither inside nor outside the juridical
order. The difference between exclusion and abandonment turns on
the fact that abandonment is an active, relational process. The one who
is abandoned remains in a relationship with sovereign power: included
through exclusion. It is thus ‘‘impossible to say clearly whether that
which has been banned is inside or outside the juridical order’’ (Mills
2004:44).
The interest and force of Agamben’s theorizing comes from his
insistence that the technologies of abandonment have contemporary
relevance. One source of this continuing relevance lies within what
Agamben sees as a structural contradiction at the heart of modern
democratic societies. This is the promise and simultaneous failure to
reconcile biological life and political life: ‘‘it [modern democracy] wants
to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place—
‘bare life’—that marked their subjection’’ (Agamben 1998:10). But this
reconciliation is never entirely effected and distinctions are persistently
made between active and passive citizenship, between lives with and
without political and economic value. The ‘‘highest political task’’ within
modern democratic societies, he argues, becomes that of defining a
threshold of who is inside active citizenship and who is excluded, whose
life is politically relevant and whose life ceases to be relevant. Because
entry into political life in modern democratic societies is in the first
instance through the body’s birth, much of this struggle about the
worth of different types of human lives takes place through medica-
lised, gendered and racialized discourses about the health, vigour, and
civility of the body. The health of the body politic is maintained
through the regulation and maintenance of individual bodies. Impure,
poor and aging bodies can be seen as costly to the social body; hence
the logic of Foucault’s observation about the intimate relation between
death and life within the modern biopolitical state.
Agamben argues that certain events of the 20th century are both
evidence of and cause for nation states to police the nation’s biologi-
cal body ever more vigorously. In particular, he notes the growing
numbers of refugees, who have been cast out by certain nations and
can be seen as a threat to the integrity of other nation-states. He notes
as well the increasing tendency, starting in 1915, for states to legalise
the denaturalization of certain groups of citizens.4 We might add

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1055

current tendencies within neo-liberalism to judge moral worth in

terms of self-care, such that a ‘mismanaged’ life is itself evidence of
and grounds for abandonment (Brown 2003).5
Not only is there a proliferation of cases of legal abandonment in
the contemporary world, Agamben argues that we live in more inti-
mate spatial terms with those who have been abandoned.6 He cites
the concentration camp as the paradigmatic space of exception where
the suspension of the law becomes localized. He claims that the camp
is now widespread and, in fact, is ‘‘the hidden matrix of the politics in
which we are . . . living’’ (175). He urges us to ‘‘learn to recognize [the
camp] in all its metamorphoses’’ (175) within the spaces of the city.
He cites as examples zones of detention in airports and ‘‘certain
outskirts of our cities’’ (1998:175). And he alerts us to the fact that
‘‘we must expect not only new camps but also always new and more
lunatic regulative definitions of the inscription of [bare] life in the city.
The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the
new biopolitical nomos of the planet’’ (original emphasis, 1998:176).

Embodying Homo Sacer

Agamben is offering a philosophical analysis, and is preoccupied with
a general topological process that produces exclusion within inclusion
in liberal democratic societies. This is a process ‘‘in which what was
presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a
Mobius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of
exception)’’(1998:37). I would like to contribute to a fuller empirical
specification of his argument by considering how power works to
target and manage certain groups in concrete spaces. As one aspect
of this, I argue that geographies do more than contain or localize bare
life. Geographies are part of the process by which certain individuals
and groups are reduced to bare life. They are therefore integral to the
process that Agamben describes.
Empirical specification also suggests that legal abandonment takes
different forms, which need to be both noted and theorized. I pursue
in particular the gendering of legal abandonment. As Catherine Mills
has noted, Agamben is ‘‘not at all sensitive to the gendered dimen-
sion’’ (2004:58). This is perplexing because Agamben develops his
analysis of legal abandonment through a distinction between public
and private, which he maps onto the categories of political and
biological life. In the classical Roman world, he argues, politics were
anchored by and operated through these distinctions. Political life
emerged in the public sphere of the city, while other systems of
(pre-political, patriarchal) authority operated in the home.7 The fig-
ure of homo sacer was produced as bare life through the sovereign
ban. Bare life is not equivalent to biological life: it is life reduced to

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matter, ‘‘an exposure of natural life to the force of the law in aban-
donment . . . . the irreparable exposure of life to death in the sovereign
ban’’ (Mills, 2004:46). In Agamben’s account of modern
democracy, it is the unstable blurring of biological and political life
(which takes form as the sovereign citizen) that creates the conditions
of modern biopower, in which the state administers the health of the
national body through and in the name of the health of individual
bodies.
Given the gendered nature of the public/private divide, so amply
explored within feminist scholarship (Landes 1998; Marston 1990;
Pateman 1988), it is inconceivable that these processes work in a
uniform way for men and women.8 As Rooney notes, ‘‘it is only in
living memory’’ that the domestic and family has been ‘‘genuinely
subject to the rule of law’’ (2002, 141). Recasting private domestic
issues such as childcare and domestic assault as public ones remains
an area of intense political contest. Feminists have long explored the
paradox that women’s issues are often depoliticized by being enclaved
within the private sphere, while women are simultaneously less able
than men to maintain the stability of the distinction between private
and public (eg, they are more vulnerable to having their ‘private’
selves made into a spectacle through publicity (Fraser 1992)).
Brown (2004) underlines the fact that it is not simply the case that
women have had troubled access to the public sphere. Rather,
women’s formal equality within the public sphere has been entirely
dependent on their subordination within the home. Comparing the
political incorporation of women and Jews in 18th and 19th century
Europe, she concludes that, while
racialization [may first appear as] a more powerfully determining
discourse than sexualization in establishing limits to nation-state
incorporation, . . . sexualization functions as a more relentlessly sub-
ordinating discourse and is therefore precisely what permits
women’s enfranchisement as political equals without the risk of
substantive equality—and more importantly, without a risk of a
challenge to the masculinist, heterosexual, and Christian norms at
the heart of the putative universality of the state (23).
Bare life and legal abandonment are not equivalent to the private
sphere, but the wealth of feminist theorizing on the way that the
private-public divide works within modern democracy has to be
brought to bear on processes of legal abandonment. Both the produc-
tion of the home as a gendered private space, and women’s especial
difficulty in maintaining the border between private and public, are
key resources for the legal abandonment of women. The point here is
not only that many of those who are placed in the position of bare life
are women. It is also that both admission to citizenship and rendering

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1057

individuals as bare life are accomplished through—and often in the

name of—gendered and heterosexual norms. Legal abandonment
occurs through a complex and gendered layering and enfolding of
geographies of public and private, one into the other. I am not
claiming that women’s gender subordination creates the most egre-
gious instances of legal abandonment. I am suggesting that there are
real limitations to generalizing across the experiences of men and
women, and across racialized and gendered forms of abandonment,
and—most importantly—that gender hierarchies support and relay
the split between biological and political life, which is both cause and
effect of abandonment. As Lisa Sanchez comments, ‘‘the law of
exclusion, far from being an equal-opportunity subordinator, targets
gendered and racialized bodies most persistently, but it does so
partially and differentially’’ (2004:879).
I would like to develop this argument in relation to the two exam-
ples with which I began, the missing women in Vancouver’s
Downtown Eastside, and the circumstances of Filipina domestic
workers. My desire to work with the two cases emerges first from
the uncanny ways that the stories haunt each other. One of the stories
that the media has circulated about the fate of the missing women is
that their remains were consumed by pigs on the farm of the accused,
and that the pigs were then slaughtered and distributed for human
consumption. Although it is estimated that the pig meat was distrib-
uted to 40 acquaintances of the accused murderer (Pynn 2004:A1),
the media has identified one Filipino man—Crisanto Diopita—as a
key recipient, and suggest that the accused murderer was ‘‘well known
in the Filipino community’’ (Skelton and Fong 2004:A4). The fact
that Diopita is both the only acquaintance named and is identified as
Filipino is, I think, significant, given a long colonial history of marking
Filipino ‘primitivism’ through habits of food consumption.9
Cannibalism—even second order and accidental cannibalism—is yet
another iteration of this marking. So too, the experience of being
stigmatized as a prostitute haunts Filipino domestic workers, who
speak of ongoing battles against being cast as prostitutes or otherwise
immoral women (Pratt 2004; Pratt in collaboration with the
Philippine Women Centre 2005). The cases are provocative to read
against each other for additional reasons. In both cases the women’s
claims to rights are compromised by the fact that they embody parti-
cular racialised historical geographies. These racialized geographies
nonetheless locate them at the limits of the Canadian nation in
different respects: many of the missing women were aboriginal and
domestic workers are prospective immigrants. One haunts the nation-
state from ‘within’as a reminder of the inability of the state to con-
clude the act of colonization, the other marks a troubled passage from

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‘outside’. They thus collaborate to call into question the completeness

of the territorialization of the nation-state.10
The differences between the cases are particularly productive in
another respect. Both examples draw our attention to the fact that it
is often women who are cast into bare life, but sex workers and
domestic helpers lie at and play upon provocative extremes within
gendered norms: that of public whore and domesticated mother. The
locations of the case studies call up these same extremes. The
Downtown Eastside includes the poorest census tract in Canada,
and is the site of high concentrations of drug addiction, prostitution,
HIV-AIDS and Hepatitis B. It is where one expects to find the state
of exception.11 I want to unsettle this expectation by looking as well at
a more banal, less predictable and less sensationalized place of excep-
tion: the middle-class home. Each case also offers opportunities to
explore how conventional attempts to bring abandoned subjects back
from bare life can be limited by the ways that they re-enact gender
and class norms. They bring to each other doubts about conventional
political strategy: the ineffectiveness of the legislative victories of
domestic workers suggest the violence of exclusion through non-
citizenship; the case of the murdered women tells domestic workers
that citizenship is no protection. Finally, each case brings us close to
one of two figures that Agamben offers as a means to re-envision
political community, such that we might tentatively explore them.
These are the refugee and the human being so degraded as to
demand an ethics beyond liberal humanism. Different zones of excep-
tion offer different opportunities for thought.

Producing Vancouver’s Missing Women as Bare Life

For many years the police insisted that the missing women had not
been killed: they were merely transient (de Vries 2003; Pitman 2002).
That police could lose track of so many of these women is in some
ways astonishing, especially given that the women were for the most
part sex workers, whose bodies were undoubtedly closely surveilled.
Activists argue that gentrification pressures in this area have only
increased the policing of prostitution in this part of the city (this has
had the effect of forcing sex workers into more isolated and more
dangerous areas) (Pitman 2002). Women living in the Downtown
Eastside interviewed by Jennifer England (2004) speak of daily police
harassment that follows from the fact that they are invariably read as
prostitutes. Lana, a 52 year old aboriginal woman, describes standing
on the street with her daughter:
And then when I’m standing there, this cop goes to me like this,
‘come here’. He says ‘you standing out here again?’ And I said,
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ ‘Can you give me your

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1059

names, both of you give me your names. Cause if you’re going to act
smart you’re going to come with us’. I say ‘no I rather not come with
you, but I’d rather report you to your supervisor’. And yet they still
intimidated me because they didn’t think I would. My daughter went
over there and says, ‘what’s the problem here’ . . . and then pretty
soon, because they had made a mistake, they tried to cover up to her
(quoted in England, 2004:308).
England traces what she calls a ‘‘trope of visibility/invisibility’’, of the
women’s feelings that they are both hyper-visible and invisible, both
inside and outside the gaze of the state. Their inclusion within the law
as sex workers is simultaneously an act of exclusion.
In the case of the missing women, police and civic officials were
slow to accept that they were not simply transient. In response to
public requests for a concerted police investigation, the mayor, Philip
Owen, reportedly stated, ‘‘We are not running a location service’’ (de
Vries 2003:217), and first suggested that any reward that might be
offered be framed as a $5,000 incentive for women to ‘‘call home’’ (de
Vries 2003:221). These comments can be understood to reflect some
unfounded geographical assumptions about the inherent mobility of
drug addicts12 and sex workers, based on speculation that they may
have entered a treatment program, or may be seeking to distance
themselves from their stigmatized lives as prostitutes, in another
location under another identity.13 Lisa Sanchez’s (2004) contends
that the sex worker is ‘‘a subject who is always already out of place
. . . an eternal outsider who cannot be displaced [because she has no
place], a figure of eternal motion, elusive and ghost-like, both illegal
and impossible.’’ One part of this illusive mobility is a suspicion that
prostitutes lead double lives. Wright (2004) traces how police in
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico have justified their failure to stop the flow of
murders of hundreds of women by casting doubt on their morality.
Family and friends are often asked, ‘‘Are you sure that she didn’t lead
a double life?’’ (377). Similarly (but in reverse), in Vancouver the
suspicion of their return to respectable life justified police inaction.
Another geographical way of making sense of the police argument
about transience is to note that at least 39 of the missing women were
aboriginal, and to trace the colonial geography that their aboriginality
implies. There has been a long history in Canada of assuming that
aboriginals and cities are mutually exclusive. It is often assumed that
aboriginals in cities are merely transient, en route to their legislated
‘camp’, which is the Indian reserve (Peters 1996:1998)14. In other
words, the presumption of transience made sense because of other
geographical assumptions. All of these spatialities undergird legal
abandonment.

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1060 Antipode

By 1998, however, more and more women had disappeared, and

family, friends and community activists continued to call for state
action. The media uncovered the story of police operating very dif-
ferently in different spaces of the city and in relation to different
categories of citizens15. Under increasing pressure, the attorney gen-
eral and Vancouver police produced and distributed a poster about
the missing women, and announced a reward of up to $100,000 for
information leading to the arrest and conviction of a person or
persons responsible for the women’s disappearance. These represen-
tations of the missing women nonetheless undermined their claims to
be citizens with rights to police protection. On the missing persons
page of the Police Department website, for instance, there appeared
two lists on opposite sides of the screen: missing persons on the right,
missing sex workers on the left. A sister of one of the missing women
has interpreted this as evidence that: ‘‘Sex workers were excluded
from the ‘persons’ category’’ (de Vries 2003:104).
The missing women poster continues to shape media images of the
women even to this day. Its enframing of the missing women has
important effects because it is arguable that the photos, text, and
layout contribute to produce the missing women in less than a
human subject position. Jennifer England (2004) has argued that
the poster criminalized the missing women because the photographs
that appeared on this poster were in a mug shot format that either
were or resemble those taken when a person is processed during
arrest. They thus trace (or suggest) a history and micro-geography
of bodies that already have been processed and administered by the
police for their social deviancy.16 The mug shot format continues to
be used even after the women’s fate has been well established; in
January 2004, for instance, the local newspaper, The Vancouver Sun,
reused it when reporting that the remains of nine more women had
been verified (Figure 1; Culbert 2004). Cropped closely around the
head, de-contextualised, and arrayed in a grid, these photographs
report on the state’s administration of already deviant bodies, and
not on individual lives lost.17 The compulsion to quantify is so great
that the women whose DNA has been found but not identified, for
whom there is no photograph, are also represented on the grid.
At the heading of the original poster ran the title: ‘‘Missing
Downtown Eastside Women.’’ The poster thus explicitly located the
women within a particular space: the Downtown Eastside. This has
also persisted in media reportage. For instance, when it was reported
in the national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, that Dawn Crey’s
remains had been identified in January 2004, the first fact that we
learnt was that Crey was ‘‘a drug addict who lived in a residential hotel
in Vancouver’s seamy Downtown Eastside (Armstrong 2004:A7).
Identification with the Downtown Eastside is problematic because

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1061

Figure 1: Locating missing women

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1062 Antipode

media representations of the neighbourhood tend to be uniformly

negative and sensational. Rather than presenting its complexities,
including a rich and diverse tradition of artistic production and poli-
tical organizing, media regularly present the Downtown Eastside as
the epicenter of a national crisis in illegal drug use (England, 2004),
and ‘‘probably Canada’s worst neighbourhood.’’ It has been described
as outside ‘‘civilization,’’ literally beyond ‘‘the boundary into hell’’
(quotes are taken from the Vancouver Sun in summer 1998;
Sommers and Blomley 2003:19). Simply being in this space is taken
as evidence of the women’s degeneracy. This is an argument that
Sherene Razack has made in relation to the 1995 murder of Pamela
George, an aboriginal women working as a sex worker in another
western Canadian city. Trying to understand why the two white mid-
dle-class 19-year-old men who killed Pamela George received rela-
tively light sentences, Razack states succinctly: ‘‘[s]he was of the space
where murders happen; they were not’’ (2000:126).
A complex layering of imaginative geographies has led to the
reduction of missing women to bare life, such that the police failed
to investigate their disappearances, in some cases for over twenty
years. First, there was the assumed mobility of sex workers. Second,
there are the colonial geographies that make First Nations women
almost naturally disappear in an urban context. Third, there is the
unremitting stigmatization of the Downtown Eastside, and the persis-
tent association of the women with it. Finally, women were and
continue to be represented almost exclusively as diseased, crimina-
lized, impoverished and degenerate bodies, now—literally—as disem-
bodied DNA or as dead contaminating meat. It is not only that
geographies contain bare life—that camps localize states of the excep-
tion. Imaginative and material geographies are part of the process of
constructing certain categories of people as bare life.
In the case of the missing women, the location of the accused
murderer’s home, which is also the site where the women’s remains
have been found, has only cemented the reduction of the women to
bare life. The accused murderer owned and lived on a pig farm, which
was also the site of notorious parties to which the murdered women
were allegedly transported directly from the Downtown Eastside.
Aerial photographs of the farm have appeared in local newspapers
(and are reprinted in Oleksijczuk (2003)). These distanced aerial
photographs show the farm framed by neat rows of suburban housing
developments, and thus excite the viewer to speculate on their own
proximity to danger and to explore their vulnerability to the barbar-
ism living right next door. 18 There is an odd symmetry between this
photograph and popular understandings of the spatial order of the
Downtown Eastside, as a bounded area of disorder at the heart of the
city or civilized life. In February 2002, the Vancouver Sun began to

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1063

explore a story that played on fears of an inability to contain this

disorder: there was speculation that fragments of some of the
women’s bodies had entered the food chain through a local rendering
plant to which the accused delivered pig entrails. The director of the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency was quoted as speculating: ‘‘I can’t
imagine any testing that would distinguish, um, you know—animal
matter one from another’’ (Bolen and Kines 2002:A6; quoted in
Oleksijczuk 2003:112). Bare life indeed.

Reclaiming the Missing Women from Bare Life, and

Erasing them Once Again
Not all of the media coverage has reduced the Missing Women to
bare life. These women are often returned to their full humanity
through the caring and grieving voices of their family members.
Because these family members are typically located outside the
Downtown Eastside, they also reconnect the women—typically as
sisters and daughters—with non-stigmatized places.19 Bev Pitman
(2002:176) has argued that the sympathy evoked by these stories
created in 1999 ‘‘an uncommon kind of [cross-class, inter-racial] com-
munity’’ in Vancouver. We can see this community at work still in Kati
Campbell’s art piece with which I began. In a newspaper review of her
show (Laurence 2004:35), Campbell is quoted as saying: ‘‘I was
thinking really hard about how to deal with these losses in a way
that does not add to the media spectacle.’’ ‘‘What could I give,’ she
asks, ‘‘that would be a real aid to mourning?’’ She settled on crafting
67 shawls, one for each murdered or missing woman’s mother. Each
shawl is embroidered with lines of text that are words and phrases
that refer to the names of the missing women. ‘‘The most prevalent
middle name of all the women,’’ Campbell tells us, ‘‘is Louise—it
turns up at least a dozen times . . . . Louise means ‘brave warrior’, so
it’s a wonderful refrain that works its way through the piece.’’ The
reviewer of Campbell’s work recognises her politicized intent, namely
to address ‘‘our culture’s refusal to empathize with drug addicts and
prostitutes, as if they have somehow forfeited their humanity and
their emotional ties’’ (35). Still, she presses Campbell to link the
specifics of her personal life to the grief of the mothers of the
murdered women. In particular, she invites her to compare their
grief to her own grief over the accidental death of her 15-month old
daughter. We are told that Campbell is ‘‘reluctant’’ to do this. She tells
the reviewer that, ‘‘the first time my partner made the connection, I
couldn’t even see it.’ Pressed by the journalist, ‘‘she does agree that
her understanding of grief and mourning made empathy possible’’
(Laurence 2004:35).

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1064 Antipode

Campbell’s hesitation to equate her grief with that of the murdered

women’s mothers is one that I want to pursue. It is not that empathy
is misguided, but that the generalized grieving solicited by the jour-
nalist potentially abstracts the murdered women’s lives in troubling
ways. Empathy through normalised family loss humanizes the mur-
dered women by locating them within narratives of the middle-class
family. Not only is this a gendered and heteronormative narrative, it
privatizes, individualizes, and potentially depoliticizes aboriginal
women’s and sex workers’ specific marginality in the Downtown
Eastside. In short, it is too easy to empathize in a generalized way
as mothers (or sisters or fathers or brothers) if it allows us to evade
the specificity of sex workers’ lives and their particular (state reg-
ulated) vulnerability to violence.20
The propensity to neutralize specific race and class experiences was
demonstrated in a striking way when America’s Most Wanted, a US
reality television program, focused its sights on the Vancouver
Missing Women case in 1999. Halfway through the segment, there
was a dramatic re-enactment of the disappearance of Sarah de Vries,
one of the missing women. A young white woman was shown stepping
into a brown van. Given her mixed African-Canadian and aboriginal
heritage, this is a curious portrayal of Sarah de Vries. Bev Pitman
(2002) understands this whitening of Sarah de Vries to reflect an
attempt to increase audience identification among white middle-
class viewers. But, as Pitman notes, this enacts ‘‘for a second time’’
(179) the violence of removing an aboriginal woman from the streets
of Vancouver. This is also a tactic of re-incorporating the missing
women into the social body by assimilating them within the space of
the white middle-class family. It establishes the family as the criterion
by which their life is grieveable, and it resituates the missing women—
not as citizens within the city—but within the private sphere of pre-
political life.
I want to turn now to the case of Filipina domestic workers because
it thoroughly disrupts the middle class home as an unambiguous
space from which to build inclusion. It possibly also provides another
model for thinking about returning those who have been cast into
bare life to full humanity.

Producing Filipina Domestic Workers as Bare Life

This is little doubt that those who come through the Canadian federal
government’s Live-in Caregiver Program are in an ambiguous legal
state. They are on temporary work visas, living in Canada as citizens
of another country. As such, their residency in Canada is carefully
monitored, and periodically there is a high profile deportation that
makes visible through example the discretion and force of state

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1065

power. Most live-in caregivers come to Canada from the

Philippines. As is the case for most sending countries, the
Philippines has been largely ineffectual in protecting the rights of its
citizens working abroad as domestic workers (Pratt 2004). Domestic
workers’ rights within Canada are on equally shaky ground. For
example, employers are told by the Canadian federal government
that ‘‘Citizenship and Immigration Canada is not party to, nor does
it bear responsibility for, the enforcement of’’ their employment con-
tract with the domestic worker (cited in Stasiulis and Bakan
2004:250). In other words, protection of employee rights is a provin-
cial, and not a federal, responsibility. Critics argue that this position
signals to employers ‘‘implicit permission to violate contract provi-
sions’’ (Stasiulis and Bakan 2002:250). In any case, the employment
contract is itself paradoxical because it is a contract to assume the
status of live-in servant, ‘‘at which point,’’ in the words of a Canadian
legal scholar, ‘‘the contractual model (with its assumption of juridical
equality) ceases to inform the internal operation of the relationship’’
(Macklin 1992:749). It is not, as one activist put it, ‘‘that all employers
are mean, nasty, dirty, evil people in comparison with lovely domestic
workers. The point is, the way the system is set up, it’s very easy to
abuse domestic workers because they are in powerless position’’
(quoted in Macklin 1992:729). ‘‘That many (perhaps most) employers
choose not to mistreat their domestic workers does not negate the
availability of the option’’ (Macklin 1992:729). This is precisely the
state of exception of which Agamben writes, where law is decided and
administered in a discretionary way and those who are abandoned are
both inside and outside the jurisdiction of the law.
One of the issues that I have explored over the last decade is how
and why this program of indentured servitude persists in a liberal
democratic society such as Canada. Not only does it persist without
much censure or popular protest, but it is usually perceived in positive
terms. This is a space of exception that liberal middle-class Canadians
seem to administer with a clear conscience. This clear conscience is in
part due to the fact that domestic workers can apply for citizenship
after 24 months in the program. The policy is thus a time-limited
period of legal abandonment for which citizenship is judged as com-
pensation (Pratt in collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre
2005). But it is also intimately bound up with the material and sym-
bolic spaces in which domestic work occurs and the geographies that
are read into Filipinas (Pratt 2004).
The point about the literal spaces in which domestic work is carried
out is simply this: in many ways the home is still perceived to be a
private, non-political space that ought to be free from state interference.
Domestic labour is typically not seen as work. Employers have a very
difficult time distinguishing whether the labour of live-in caregivers is

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1066 Antipode

Figure 2: A curious comparison between nanny and dog

Note: This is a rendering of the photograph which appeared in the newspaper. It was not
possible to obtain permission to use the orginal photograph.

waged labour, the work of social reproduction or gifts of labour time.

This is especially so when domestic workers are compelled to live in
the employer’s home. It seems reasonable to ask domestic workers to
watch children for an extra half hour or so, when they are, in any case,
present in the home. It may seem reasonable to ask a domestic worker
to clean the family’s dishes after meals because she presumably needs
to do at least some of this labour as a means of reproducing herself.
Domestic workers labour in a zone of indistinction between work and
leisure, private and public space, between biological and political life.
But it is not only that domestic work is done within the home; there
are other geographies at work that systematically reduce Filipinas to
bare life, so as to make their ambiguous legal status unremarkable.
One plays on a discourse of primitivism, another on their utter
desperation as ‘third world women’. There are many ways into the
primitivism argument because it is so pervasive. I have been told
about it by many nanny agents operating in Vancouver (Pratt 2004).
For example: Filipina nannies [as compared to European nannies]
will ‘‘let your children pee in the park. They just take their pants down
in the park.’’ (Interview with Nanny Agent E, June 1994). Or:
By our standards . . . the adults who are coming over, were not raised
how we would raise our children at all . . . There’s none of this, you
know, ‘Would you please sit and eat!?’ No, they can run all over the
house eating something. . . . so it’s a hell of a life . . . They’re kind and
caring and loving and that sort of thing. But there is no discipline
and structure . . . You know, you don’t line up for a bus. You push

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1067

aside some little old lady getting on the bus. When you sit at the
table, you don’t see that there’s so much food, so you take propor-
tionately. No. You make sure you get yours first. So there’s none of
that, you see, which fits in more with a Canadian society. And there’s
a lot of learning that a lot of Filipino people have to do. (Interview
with Nanny Agent H, June 1994).
This primitivism also operates in media representations that are
meant to be critical of it. Take, for example, an in-depth article that
appeared in 2001 in the major national newspaper, The Globe and
Mail (Figure 2; Saunders 2001). The article advocates for domestic
workers in Los Angeles by comparing the deplorable wages and
conditions of domestic workers with the expenses that affluent house-
holds willingly pay for the care of their dogs. The comparison should
be made between children and dogs on the one hand, and domestic
workers and the various groomers, dog walkers, etc. who are hired to
care for dogs on the other. But both the text and visuals work
differently. Because the dog caregivers are absent from the visuals,
we pair the domestic worker with the dog, a reading that is prompted
by the title, ‘‘You wouldn’t wish it on a dog’’. This reading is particu-
larly problematic in Canada, where the majority of foreign domestic
workers are Filipino, and one means of primitivising Filipinos is
precisely through their reputation as ‘dogeaters’.
There is a second characteristic of their geography that sticks to
Filipinas so as to turn their indentured servitude in Canada into a
kind of rescue mission: this is the assumption of utter destitution of
life in the Philippines. Again, various nanny agents whom I have
interviewed in Vancouver voiced this assumption. Explaining why
established labour standards of minimum wage and overtime provi-
sions cannot be applied to domestic work, one nanny agent reasoned:
‘‘[this] would not work at all. There’s not the money there [within the
household budgets of prospective Canadian employers]. It will just
cut down on the amount of immigration from the Philippines tremen-
dously, because that [the Live-in Caregiver Program] is the foot in the
door for many immigrants . . . You know, things are not good back in
the Philippines. . . . They would be doomed to a life there’’ (Interview
with Nanny Agent H, June 1994).
Domestic workers are certainly coming to Canada for the opportu-
nity to immigrate and for economic opportunities, but destitution is
not an accurate representation of many of their circumstances given
the program requirements that they have linguistic competence in one
of the two national languages and two years of post-secondary educa-
tion. Rhacel Parrenas (2005) has argued that it is in fact the middle
classes in the Philippines who are most prone to do overseas contract
work. They do this in order to maintain their middle class standing in

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1068 Antipode

the face of massive privatization of state services in the Philippines,

especially health and education services, occurring under the disci-
pline of the IMF and World Bank. The educational credentials of the
15 domestic workers with whom I have worked closely over the last
decade (Pratt and the Philippine Women Centre 2005) certainly bear
this out: considering their educational qualifications from the
Philippines, one was trained as a social worker, one as a registered
nurse, five as midwives, seven as school teachers and one as a nurses’
aid. Yet media fascination with poverty in the Philippines, for exam-
ple with the sale of body organs, does nothing to convey this message
of middle-class labour migration—of the basic similarity between
middle class Canadians and the Filipinas whom they employ as
servants.
I have argued, then, that practices of legal abandonment do not
simply happen anywhere; they are always accomplished through par-
ticular material and symbolic geographies. Assumptions about the
inherent transience of the missing women led to police neglect.
Live-in caregivers have precarious claims to workers’ rights because
they work and live in their employers’ homes. In both cases, the space
of the home disrupts claims to full active citizenship. For domestic
workers, labour in the home is indistinct from social reproduction and
leisure activities, and they tend to be conceived with familial relations.
The home is a private space to some extent presumed to be beyond
state regulation. For missing women, it was their inability to claim
home in the Downtown Eastside that rendered them invisible. But
subsequent efforts to bring these women into visibility tend to relo-
cate them in their familial homes, in private depoliticized spaces that
equally strip them of their status as public citizens. Such forms of legal
abandonment are gendered and racialized. Although Agamben
claims that the very distinction between public and private is de-
activated in the state of exception, the continuing gendering of the
distinction is itself a resource for legal abandonment. The instability
of women’s passage from private into political life haunts these
women and returns to produce them as bare life. Layers of taken-
for-granted gendered and racialised geographies make unremarkable
the abandonment of certain groups of women.

An End to Civil War?

While Agamben’s insensitivity to gender is perplexing and limiting, I
do not want to under estimate the significant opportunities that he
brings to feminist theorizing and strategizing. Legal abandonment is
not another way of telling the story of the private sphere, and bare life
is not equivalent to a feminized social existence of toil within the
domestic realm. Bare life describes a human life reduced to matter, a

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1069

life in many ways beyond gendered existence. I am particularly inter-

ested by the ways in which his theorizing challenges feminists to
rethink political strategy for bringing abandoned women back to
social life, as fully human beings. How, in particular, might
Agamben’s theorizing provoke us to think beyond conventional
means of bringing homo sacer back to life through the production of
similarity within liberalism? My own efforts in the last section to
retrieve Filipino domestic workers as professionals operates within
this circuit of producing inclusion through similarity. The danger of
rehabilitating the goodness of middle-class professional immigrants is
that it potentially reinstates a division between good and bad immi-
grants (Honig 1998; Ong 1996), and thus continues the process of
nation-building through the production of bare life. Might Agamben’s
theorizing enable us to rethink more profoundly our relationship to
biopolitical sovereignty, a form of sovereignty that is driven to aban-
don more and more citizens as a way of purifying and enhancing the
health of the nation, a form of sovereignty that wages a kind of
continual civil war through the production of bare life?
The two cases that I have considered are intriguing because they
bring us close to two limit-concepts that Agamben uses to re-imagine
political community. One is the human so degraded as to exist beyond
conventional humanist ethics of respect, dignity and responsibility
(Agamben 2000b). Another is the refugee who refuses assimilation
within the nation state. With respect to the latter, Agamben goes so
far as to recommend that we ‘‘build our political philosophy anew
starting from the one and only figure of the refugee’’ (2000a:15). The
importance of this figure is that it severs the connection between
personhood and the nation-state, a link that is forged in liberal
societies through the concept of the citizen and territorialisation of
individual rights within the nation-state. The figure of the refugee
who refuses assimilation is of one who refuses to submit their person-
hood to the territorializing biopolitical state.
I want to think with the figure of the refugee in relation to foreign
domestic workers because it provokes a different line of political
strategy than the one pursed in recent years by the Philippine
Women Centre. Their main strategy has been to lobby for the eradi-
cation of the Live-in Caregiver Program. A second strategy is to force
the Canadian government to allow Filipinos to migrate to Canada on
the basis of their professional credentials, typically within the health
professions. In other words, they are attempting to force the
Canadian government to admit Filipinos as citizens rather than as
labour migrants. Agamben asks us to think about political strategy in
other terms because seeking inclusion as citizens does nothing to
disrupt a political community based on a process of abandonment.

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1070 Antipode

Agamben urges the need to imagine fully political subjects outside of

and beyond specifically liberal notions of citizenship.
What might this mean for domestic workers? Without really know-
ing the answer to this question, I have become increasingly interested
in the refusals voiced by Filipina domestic workers once they have
received Canadian citizenship. Over the decade I have worked with a
number of the women who came through the Live-in Caregiver
Program and are now permanently settled in Canada, but who
received their Canadian citizenship very unwillingly. They feel that
their migration was forced on them by economic circumstances
brought on by the corruption of the Philippine government and the
stranglehold of the World Bank and IMF, and they remain bitter
about their experiences in Canada as live-in domestic workers (Pratt
and the Philippine Women Centre 2005). In short, they are ambiva-
lent Canadian citizens.
In recent years, I have also worked with Filipino-Canadian immi-
grant youth, some who are children of these domestic workers.
Feeling alienated from what they perceive to be a racist Canadian
society, they have sought different, extra-territorial attachments in
their identification as Filipino (Pratt in collaboration with the
Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance 2004). This identification takes
them on regular visits to the Philippines and they gather political
strength from a history of student activism in the Philippines. The
tenth annual cultural evening of the Filipino-Canadian Youth
Alliance in May 2005, for instance, was organized under the theme
of ‘Ipagpatuloy: Living the Storm’, to reference that this year also
marks the 35th anniversary of the First Quarter Storm, a three month
period in 1970 of mass mobilization in the Philippines to protest the
Marcos regime, and to draw a line of continuity between this struggle
and their own in Canada. They have also crafted a strong network of
linkages in Europe and the United States. Linkages to Amsterdam,
where Professor Jose Maria Sison lives in the state of exception21, are
strong. But I am particularly interested in the ways that these youth
articulate their transnational Filipino identity with other youth groups
in Vancouver. At the moment, one of their strongest alliances is with
First Nations youth organizations. They articulate their alliance
around a common theme of displacement and forced migration, as
well as a shared critique of liberal norms and the uneven application
of them. I want to argue that this process of alliance building offers a
moment for imaging political community within Canada, not based in
identification through an abstract notion of national belonging or
citizenship rights, but as a series of incomplete translations across
partially overlapping issues and concerns. That process of translation
requires a laboured process of reading across particular embedded
histories, for example, the displacement of First Nations in Canada

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1071

and the land question in the Philippines. Political solidarities are

constructed, but social and political identification is always excessive
to these alliances. Perhaps this is one model for realizing what
Agamben urges for all of us: that is, ‘‘to recognize the refugee that
he or she is’’ (2000a:25), namely a person whose identifications and
claims to social and political life exceed citizenship.
The missing women may offer another way to think through the
aporia of the irreconcilability of political and biological life within
liberalism. Consider a poem written by Sarah de Vries, one of the
murdered women:
Woman’s body found beaten beyond recognition
You sip your coffee
Taking a drag of your smoke
Turning the page
Taking a bite of your toast
Just another day
Just another death
Just one more thing you so easily forget
You and your soft, sheltered life
Just go on and on
For nobody special from your world is gone
Just another day
Just another death
Just another Hastings Street whore
Sentenced to death
The judge’s gavel already fallen
Sentence already passed
But you
You just sip your coffee
Washing down your toast.
She was a broken-down angel
A child lost with no place
A human being in disguise
She touched my life

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1072 Antipode

She was somebody

She was no whore
She was somebody special
Who just lost her way
She was somebody fighting for life
Trying to survive
A lonely lost child who died
In the night, all alone, scared
Gasping for air.
Sarah de Vries (de Vries 2003:233–4)
Sarah anticipated our neglect. She imagined us reading about a
murdered sex worker’s death as we eat our breakfast toast. The
woman has been legally abandoned: the judge’s gavel has already
fallen. She is beaten beyond recognition, and dies scared and all
alone. In a book memorializing her sister’s life and death, Maggie
de Vries agonizes over this aloneness, and expresses a desire to have
borne witness to Sarah’s murder.
This resonates, in an uncanny way, with Agamben’s (2000b) discus-
sion of the ethical force of the testimony of survivors from Auschwitz.
He argues that such survivors speak by proxy for those who did not
survive. Further, the dehumanizing process of Auschwitz reduced
many prisoners to a state in which they had lost their capacity to
observe and testify. Witnessing, on the part of survivors, entails bring-
ing into language that which does not have a language because the
victims were rendered mute, beyond speech. Its ethical force lies in
resisting biopolitical efforts to separate those abandoned in bare life
from speaking, fully human beings. The terrible burden of Sarah de
Vries’ poem comes from the fact that she is testifying (before the fact)
about an event (murder) that she cannot witness. She speaks in proxy
for herself, and her authority undoubtedly comes from her very own
death (Felman 2001).
How might we respond to the poem’s call for recognition, of a body
beaten beyond recognition? And how might such recognition open
up, in Judith Butler’s words, ‘‘another kind of normative aspiration in
the field of politics,’’ one that lies beyond a claim for individual rights
tied to the autonomy of our bodies (2004:26)? Sarah de Vries’ poem
is shocking and provokes shame because it bears witness to our
neglect. Had we heeded her poem, would so many women have
died? Would we have read her poem if she had not? Witnessing is
an intersubjective process, and key to the possibility for political

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1073

transformation through witnessing is the understanding that the act of

public testimony transforms those who witness such testimony (Butler
2004). Butler develops this analysis through the concept of mourning.
Mourning involves an acceptance to undergo a transformation, to be
beside oneself through grief. Rather than returning the murdered
women to us—through the conventions of family, or abstract ideals
of human dignity and respect, or paranoid fears about a generalized
vulnerability to sexual predators—mourning the missing women
would involve allowing our relationship to them to change us, to
become dispossessed from ourselves. A key moment of dispossession
might be to recognize what these women experienced long before
their murders. This is the chilling process of abandonment within the
everyday spaces of our cities, and a normalized passing across the
threshold into bare life.

Acknowledgements
I thank Nick Blomley, Derek Gregory, and Joel Wainwright for their
close readings of earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Heidi Nast for
her comments as referee. I have benefited hugely from thoughtful and
probing responses to presentations given at U.B.C., Tokyo Keizai
University, the University of Minnesota and University of Toronto.
Thanks very much to Noel Castree and Melissa Wright for their
editorial assistance, and for the opportunity to bring this paper to
completion as the Antipode Lecture at the 2005 annual meetings of
the Association of American Geographers. I thank Maggie de Vries
for permission to reprint her sister’s poem.

Endnotes
1
Twelve of these assaults took place in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, and the
rest in Southeast Asia. The accused, Donald Bakker, is the first Canadian to be
charged under Canada’s new ‘‘sex tourism law’’, which makes it possible to prosecute
Canadians for sexual abuse of children outside of Canada.
2
This comment was made in casual conversation with Cecilia Diocson in July 2003.
3
To modern ears the name is deceptive. Homo sacer was a position conferred by
ancient Roman law upon those who could not be ritually sacrificed (because they were
outside divine law and their deaths thus had no value to the gods), but could be killed
(or let die) with impunity (because they had been excluded from juridical law).
4
Bhabha (2004) chronicles more recent attacks on birthright citizenship in the United
States, Canada and Ireland.
5
Brown (2003) is cautioning for more rigour in conceptualizations of neo-liberalism,
arguing that neo-liberalism draws on a very specific and especially brutal variant of
economic liberalism. Unlike earlier variants of political liberalism, neo-liberalism
collapses moral and political rationalities into the economic. She argues that citizen-
ship has been reduced to an entrepreneurial responsibility for well-being, and the
consequences of such freedom and responsibility are both individualized and
moralized.

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1074 Antipode

6
This simplifies Agamben’s argument because he is claiming that every individual
now contains an unstable mix of bare life and political subjecthood, given that entry
into citizenship is via bare life. ‘‘Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or
a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being’’
(Agamben 1998:140). However, it is also clear that he believes that some lives are
barer than others, and it is this distinction that I am pursuing here. As Peter
Fitzpatrick (2001) notes, Agamben offers two modes of conceiving bare life: one
totalizing, and another that comes in varied instantiations.
7
Another boundary defined a threshold between civilized life and a state of
(uncivilized) nature. I bracket this at the moment but this clearly becomes important
to an analysis of the racialisation of legal abandonment and in particular the ways that
discourses of primitivism naturalise legal abandonment. In the case of racialised
women, the state of nature returns and is enfolded into the geographies of private
and public in especially problematic ways.
8
Lisa Sanchez (2004) takes a stronger stance and argues that homo sacer is gendered
as masculine. She writes that ‘‘the expulsion of homo sacer is the displacement of one
who was already imagined to be inside—he is a useful enigma—an included exclu-
sion’’. In her view, certain excluded women—she writes in particular about sex work-
ers—dwell in an entirely different conceptual and legal space than homo sacer. They
are, she argues, utterly excluded, with no possibility of return. I want to take a
somewhat different tact, and argue that contemporary homo sacer is a much more
complicated figure in practice than imagined by Agamben, and to pursue what a
gendered analysis of homo sacer might look like.
9
Consider US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s remark in 1900: ‘‘a native [Filipino]
family feeds; it does not breakfast or dine, it feeds’’ (quoted in Doty 1996:39).
10
I thank Joel Wainwright for this phrasing, and for sharpening my thinking on this
point.
11
Consider an email that one of my undergraduate students sent me as I began
writing this paper. He was participating in a theatre workshop—ironically, one
entitled: Practicing Democracy—that was being held in the Downtown Eastside. He
writes:
Today was even more intense, one of the defining moments being the extreme
use of force in the arrest of a young woman right outside the rehearsal hall. The
group was on a smoke break while a couple of policemen were making what
appeared to be a routine arrest across the road, until suddenly the young woman
was taken down to the pavement and put into a choke hold. As she started
screaming and yelling, a bunch of us ran over just in time to see one of the
officers smack the girl in the back of the head. There must have been about
fifteen of us who went over, to see what could be done. The scene was pretty
crazy . . . but it was amazing how fast the young woman calmed down once she
realized that there was a huge crowd of witnesses. The police seemed a little
taken aback as well and suddenly everything was strictly by the book. One in our
group is a first aid attendant and was able to convince the police to let him make
sure the young woman (who couldn’t have been more than sixteen) was physi-
cally okay, as she was spitting up blood and vomiting. We were also able to get
the badge numbers of the policemen and called the young woman’s lawyer,
telling him that several of us had witnessed the affair. Anyway, just another
day in the downtown eastside, I guess . . . (email communication, February 2,
2004).
The role of middle class observers as witnesses who rehabilitate the rights of those
who have been cast into bare life is an important one. But this understanding also
reinforces the idea that the Downtown Eastside is truly exceptional.

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Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception 1075

12
de Vries (2003:189) argues that this displays a misunderstanding of the geographies
of survival sex work and drug addiction insofar as ‘‘as women get older and become
addicted to drugs, they become less transient, to the point where they are more or less
rooted in one spot.’’
13
These speculations found some slight support in 1999 when four of the missing
women were located: two dead and two alive (de Vries 2003:189).
14
Indeed, this assumption has been formalized in Canadian laws that have made
access to aboriginal rights contingent on residence on a First Nation’s reserve. Yet
more than 50% of First Nation’s people in Canada now live in urban areas, and Peters
(1998) has argued that the city is especially important to First Nation’s women and to
their efforts to create a space for themselves beyond patriarchal relations on reserves.
There is however a persistent inability on the part of non-aboriginal Canadians to
imagine First Nations’ peoples permanently settled within the space of the city, and a
tendency to assume a continuing link between aboriginality and the space of the
reserve. As an index of this, in the province of Manitoba the 1996 census found that
35% of the province’s natives live in cities, but about 90 percent of government
funding is aimed at reserves (Smith 2004). A recent federal decision not to appeal a
court decision about government discrimination against off-reserve natives in relation
to a specific training program has been taken by some Native advocates as a decision
that will ‘‘completely change the way that Ottawa deals with urban communities,’’
whilst ‘‘[e]xperts are divided about whether the court’s decision will oblige the federal
government to directly fund urban aboriginal groups’’ (Smith 2004:A7).
15
It should be acknowledged that some media coverage was both effective and highly
praised—in fact, one journalist (Wood 1999a:1999b) received a national award for his
investigative reporting on this issue. However, the media have abandoned the missing
women in numerous ways, including some that I do not explore. Young and Pritchard
(2005), for instance, puzzle over the small number of US media violations of the
media ban in relation to the trial of the man accused of murdering the missing women
(relative to an earlier sensationalized Canadian serial murder case). They reason that
US media have evinced less interest in the current case because the victims were sex
workers and many were aboriginal, whereas the victims of the earlier serial murderer
were white and middle class.
16
It would be unfair to overextend this point, because some of the photos were
provided by family members.
17
This stands in striking contrast to the treatment in New York newspapers of those
missing after the September 11 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. ‘‘The newspaper
portraits were of a necessity uniform. As in a high school yearbook, everyone memor-
ialized was given equal space and equal treatment’’ (Miller 2003:114). There are, how-
ever, two telling differences. First, these (typically smiling) portraits were accompanied by
written anecdotes that were meant to individuate, and provide what Miller calls ‘‘a
narrative DNA’’. Second, the newspaper editors of the New York Times publicly ‘‘pon-
dered the best strategy for identifying the singularity of each life within the constraints of
the form’’ (Miller 2003:114) and lamented the fact that such profiles were but ‘‘a single
frame lifted from the unrecountable complexity of a lived life’’ (quoted in Miller).
18
The media has deployed the same tactic with respect to Donald Bakker, the
Vancouver man accused of sex torture in January 2004. He is invariably described
as a ‘‘short and balding’’ ‘‘father of a young child’’ who lives in a middle-class
neighbourhood (Vancouver Sun 2004). In other words, he could be living next door.
19
This is also a common strategy among oppositional groups in the Downtown
Eastside. In her assessment of photographic representations of women in the
Downtown Eastside, for instance, Jennifer England (2004) contrasts two photography
shows exhibited in Vancouver in 1998. She argues that one by a well-known
Vancouver photographer, Lincoln Clarkes, eroticizes women’s poverty within the

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1076 Antipode

confined spaces of the back alleys of the Downtown Eastside. She contrasts this to a
collaboration between an artist and nine Downtown Eastside women, and notes in
particular the productive way that the latter exhibit ‘‘challenges an outsider’s view of
the community as a homogeneous, tightly bounded space’’ (91) by showing images of
Downtown Eastside women with their families moving in and out of this neighbour-
hood (on public transit for instance). This disrupts the stereotype that these women
are entrapped by and in fact synonymous with the space of the Downtown Eastside. A
similar comparison could be made between two important and widely aired films that
have been made about the Downtown Eastside: Through a Blue Lens, and Fix: Story of
an Addicted City. The former video—made in collaboration with Vancouver police—
plays directly with the theme of frontier (England 2004) and the latter begins,
significantly, with the trip by advocates for drug addicts outside of the Downtown
Eastside into the centre of official local political life: City Hall.
20
For instance, the changing regulation of prostitution in Vancouver over the last 30
years has forced sex workers into increasingly marginal and deserted locations in the
city (de Vries 2003).
21
An exiled Filipino revolutionary, Professor Sison exists within the state of the
exception. He was stranded while visiting Holland in 1987 when the Aquino govern-
ment cancelled his passport and thus legally abandoned him as a citizen of the
Philippines. Sison was recognized by the Dutch government as a political refugee
and is thus protected from expulsion. The Dutch government continues, however, to
refuse admission and rights of residence. Professor Sison is currently included on the
US list of ‘‘Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons’’ and on the list of
terrorists of the Council of the European Union and Commission of the European
Communities. He has made a complaint to the European Court of Justice demanding
that his name be removed and that he be paid damages.

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