Intimate constraints: a feminist political economy analysis of biological reproduction and parenting in high-support housing in Ontario

Abstract

To date there has been little consideration of the role of housing programs in conditioning the intimate lives of people living with mental illness labels. This article employs a Feminist Political Economy lens with insights from Mad & Disability Studies to interrogate the intimate constraints experienced by some residents in high-support mental health housing in Ontario, Canada. It demonstrates that long-standing medicalized notions of mental illness and system-wide anxiety over the social and financial costs of the reproduction of disabled bodies give rise to these intimate constraints, specifically limitations and control over biological reproduction and parenting practices. In this way, the mechanisms of intimate constraint within high-support housing are not merely holdovers from a time gone by, but are rather part of a mental health care system guided by the principles of neoliberalism under which neo-eugenics is regularly enacted. This is a timely contribution, as the province of Ontario is currently planning to expand the supportive housing system within which high-support housing is situated and because high-support housing in Ontario is rarely studied in relation to feminist political economy and/or mental health care. This article draws on documentary review of governmental and third-sector materials and 38 semi-structured interviews with service providers and residents in the high-support housing system in Ontario. It situates intimate constraints within the long history of eugenics and neo-eugenics in Ontario and Canada, and the classed, raced, and gendered hierarchy of human bodies that is taking on new forms under neoliberalism.