Waiting for the State: Sex Work and the Neoliberal Governance of Sexuality

“For Now, We Are in Waiting”: Negotiating Time in Chile's Social Housing System

“…Sociologists have long understood that waiting is patterned by social inequality (Schwartz ), and that public bureaucracies routinely allocate delays—often disproportionately to their most disadvantaged clients—as they ration limited resources (Lipsky ). Yet, recent research suggests that processes of neoliberal restructuring have made waiting an ever more prevalent experience of subaltern groups (Jeffrey ), as state retrenchment (Jeffrey and Young ; Lara‐Millán ), coupled with ascendant ideologies of individual responsibility, has meant that citizens are increasingly “made to wait for, rather than be acted upon by, the state” (Rivers‐Moore , p. 405).…”

“…One perspective situates waiting among the manifold state strategies to reduce welfare rolls in contexts of neoliberal retrenchment (cf. Wacquant ), arguing that the imposition of time‐costs and uncertainty encourages citizens to abandon expectations of access to public goods (Reid ), and instead pursue privatized alternatives to meet their needs (Rivers‐Moore ). These studies show how street‐level bureaucrats draw on institutionalized notions of (un)deservingness to allocate delays to those perceived as illegitimate claimants, such as suspected drug users in emergency rooms (Lara‐Millán ), or supposed “welfare cheats” seeking disaster relief (Reid ).…”

“…First, housing‐seekers in Santiago confronted waiting as organized actors, rather than atomized individuals—a product of state reforms that sought to facilitate orderly, collective housing provision (see below). Most existing studies, by contrast, analyze waiting for individualized benefits (Auyero ; Reid ; Rivers‐Moore ) in which atomized subjects, unable to articulate shared grievances, are limited to individual choices between passive submission and forfeiture of claims. Some ethnographic evidence, however, suggests that when waiting is lived collectively—in formal groups like neighborhood associations (Auyero and Swistun ) or informal public spaces where waiters gather (Jeffrey and Young )—contentious responses can emerge.…”

“…Even when lived collectively, however, waiting can encourage individual citizens to abandon claims for public provision (Reid ) or seek more expeditious private alternatives (Rivers‐Moore ). The importance of this possibility—adapting a central insight from Hirschman ()—is that waiting subjects are less likely to use “voice” to contest temporal disempowerment when there are viable opportunities for individual “exit.” Thus, attention must be paid to a second condition: the availability and costs of individual alternatives to waiting for state provision, which can vary across contexts as well as over time.…”

“…However, I challenge a prevalent notion in this literature that waiting produces unitary effects that flow directly from dominant state projects. In particular, scholars have argued that waiting serves the objectives of neoliberalizing states, either by forging durably passive subjects who learn to submit to arbitrary decisions of state actors (Auyero ), or by encouraging citizens to abandon claims for public assistance (Reid ) and turn to privatized strategies to meet their needs (Rivers‐Moore ). In contrast to more top‐down understandings of “temporal domination” (Reid ), I demonstrate how long waits for housing in Santiago gave rise to a dynamic “politics of waiting” (Jeffrey ) in which the poor enacted multiple and sometimes contentious practices.…”