Abstract
Drugged bodies are commonly depicted as passive, suffering and abject, which makes it hard for them to be known in other ways. Wanting to get closer to these alternative bodies and their resourcefulness for living, I turned to body-mapping as an inventive method for telling different kinds of drug-using stories. Drawing on a research project with people who inject heroin and crack cocaine in London, UK, I employed body-mapping as a way of studying drugged bodies in their relation to others, human and non-human, in the injecting event. I invited participants to draw their bodies in describing these otherwise hard-to-articulate experiences. Following Donna Haraway, I conceptualise body-mapping as a more-than-human mode of storytelling where different kinds of bodies can be known. Here, I look at three such bodies – sensing-bodies, temporal-bodies and environment-bodies – and argue that it is through being able to respond to such bodies that more hospitable ways of living with drugs can become possible.
Highlights
The Drugged BodyThe body in social studies of drug use, like sociology more broadly (Shilling, 2003, 2012; see Blackman, 2008), has been noted as an absent presence (e.g. Harris, 2015; Weinberg, 2013)
Trying to get away from these dominant representations, I use body-mapping as a way of focusing in on the embodied here-and- of what is happening in the drug-using event to move below and beyond abstraction and totalising systems of thought
In sociology, Shilling accounts for an enduring Cartesian dichotomy and dual dynamic where the body is ‘absent in the sense that sociology has rarely focused in a sustained manner on the embodied human as an object of importance in its own right’, while being ‘at the very heart of the sociological imagination’ (Shilling, 2012: 17)
Summary
The Drugged BodyThe body in social studies of drug use (including alcohol), like sociology more broadly (Shilling, 2003, 2012; see Blackman, 2008), has been noted as an absent presence (e.g. Harris, 2015; Weinberg, 2013). Trying to get away from these dominant representations, I use body-mapping as a way of focusing in on the embodied here-and- of what is happening in the drug-using event to move below and beyond abstraction and totalising systems of thought.
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