Spatial 'folds': The entwining of bodies, risks and city spaces for women injecting drug users in Melbourne's Central Business District

How do street-based injecting drug using women negotiate the myriad day to day risks of injecting in public urban space whilst, at the same time, negotiate the gendered discourses surrounding space and drug use, which work to both limit their bodily movements and position them as 'dirty', 'diseased' and 'dangerous'? How do they avoid overdose, violence, arrest and disease, whilst at the same time avoid becoming-and being treated as-a 'leper' or 'junkie? In this article we draw on the interview narratives of 14 women who regularly inject in various public city spaces in Melbourne, Australia, in order to explore their negotiations of this complex gender/space/drug- use nexus of risk. Using Deleuze's concept of the fold', along with Butler's concept of 'performative' identity, we explore the ways in which women injecting drug users, through their embodied performances and their narratives of space and risk, enfold and unfold the spaces and discourses they encounter. We suggest that the ways in which these foldings are negotiated by women, impacts upon their experiences of risk in street-based drug-use environments. Understanding these folded relations will have important implications for how we might begin to make city spaces safer for women injecting drug users, and for city users more generally.