May 2023

In 1980, The World Health Organization declared “freedom from pain” to be a universal human right. Pharmaceutical companies, particularly in the US, capitalized upon this promise, offering patients chemical solutions to physical, emotional, and social problems. This effort proved successful. Between 2015 and 2016, almost half (45.8%) of the U.S. population had used a prescription drug in the past 30 days. Individuals have increasingly learned to cope with social problems with medical technologies such as prescription drugs.

And yet, those who use prescription drugs without a doctor’s oversight—nonmedically—run the risk of facing severe consequences, such as being labeled an addict and/or a criminal. These labels result in institutional punishment and control, including incarceration.

Many people believe that transphobia is the only cause of violence experienced by transgender people. If that was true, all transgender people would be at equal risk of experiencing violence at all times. However, there are actually distinct patterns in this violence related to gender, race, and sexuality. These social systems interact in ways that increase the risk of violence for certain transgender people, while decreasing it for others. Identifying these patterns is vital to developing effective policies and practices to prevent it.

Until recently, violence against transgender people was extremely understudied, reducing our ability to effectively recognize factors shaping this violence. To address part of this knowledge gap, I used an innovative method to create an original dataset of all the known murders of transgender people in the United States during the 30-year period between 1990 and 2019. The first of its kind, this dataset is comprised of information gathered from activist, mainstream news, and government sources.

Domesticity is the foundation of the ability of the super-rich to ensure their social and economic reproduction. By delegating domestic and parental tasks, they can devote themselves fully to their work, leisure and rest.

But how do they manage to find people willing to serve them daily?

I answer this question in a recent article written from my research about full-time domesticity of multi-millionaires. Far from being an obsolete job, far from the clichés that reduce it to slavery, domesticity of the ultra-rich is based on ambivalent social relations of “golden exploitation”. What is it about?