Gender and Critical Drug Studies: An invitation and an exhortation

Abstract

This is an introduction to conjoined special issues of Contemporary Drug Problems and the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, which began with a 2015 symposium at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, organized by co-editors Nancy D. Campbell and David Herzberg. The symposium called for incorporating gender analysis into the rapidly developing scholarship on drug use, drug trade, drug science, drug treatment, and drug policy in the United States. The special issues showcase articles that are part of a vibrant body of historical, sociological, and anthropological scholarship that explores the differential effects of drug policy, focusing on how gender – in dynamic relationship to race, class, and sexuality – is integral to virtually every aspect of drug crises including (but not limited to) the relationship between drug policy, drug treatment, and the development of mass incarceration. Gender matters at every level from the intimate and highly personalized to the broad cultural and political forces that disparately apportion vulnerability within drug commerce and the US prison-industrial complex.