ABSTRACT
Philippe Bourgois' fieldwork observations of intimate injecting partners puts together a clearer picture of the intimate context in which injecting drug users who are sexual partners inject themselves and each other. Whilst the social category of gender is considered by anthropologists to be 'persuasive' in providing a causal understanding of injecting behaviour, Bourgois argues that for epidemiologists a theory of power relations are considered 'potentially ideologically biased'. This chapter aims to consider whether Bourgois' social explanation of gender in the present-to-hand logic of intimate injecting practices adequately gets to grips with the things that are unable to explain in injecting relationships. The empirical challenge of how to turn risk categories of injecting into ethnography is taken up and examined by Kane and Mason in their ethnography of everyday risk. By drawing attention to the intimate complexities of syringe sharing, the chapter complicates and contextualises knowledge of Harm Reduction.
