Women and the Politics of Pleasure in Critical Drug Studies

Ingrid Walker

doi:10.1108/978-1-83982-882-920200005

Abstract

Critical drug studies have developed a significant body of work that illuminates understanding of gender and drug use as well as drug pleasures. However, framing the study of women and their drug pleasures through critical drug studies presents potential limitations. The posthuman turn de-emphasises the primary goal of drug use: a particular subjective experience. Both the language and theoretical frameworks of new materialism potentially distance researchers, as interlocutors, from engaging the human experience of drug pleasures, rendering drug use abstract and unknowable.In a historical context in which women’s intoxication has invoked shaming and criminalisation, control of their bodies, and silencing of dissent, scholarly activism by and inclusion of women who use drugs should be foundational to critical drug studies. Autoethnography offers a modality by which personal narrative becomes a convention of academic writing. It also presents a way of performing the self critically and authentically within conceptual frameworks that explore the complex, intersectional politics of women’s drug use, ways that are representationally missing in the scholarship. An ethics of care as part of one’s practice of the self proposes a radically different way of framing drug use. The recognition and normalisation of drug pleasures as the complicated, emergent, expressions of ethical self-care that they are for women (and all people who use drugs) promises fertile ground for future scholarly exploration. Research based in the lived experience of women who use drugs will help establish languages that resituate drug use in the phenomenology of their experience.

Highlights

A branch of cultural studies, critical drug studies is an interdisciplinary field that interrogates the relationship between power and knowledge production
The future of critical drug studies is in embracing and narrativising the underrepresented lived experience of all drug use but especially the diverse nature of drug pleasures for women

Summary

Gender in Critical Drug Research

A branch of cultural studies, critical drug studies is an interdisciplinary field that interrogates the relationship between power and knowledge production. For critical drug studies, examining women and drug pleasures means engaging social knowledges, structures and norms to understand what we mean by ‘women’ and how their ‘drug pleasures’ are constituted as cultural experiences and practices. From exploration of gender performance and embodiment to social roles and the structural determinants that construct and constrain them, critical drug studies seeks to make visible how these systems and their ways of knowing influence the lives of women who use drugs. 133) identifies a significant outcome of research institutions, such as the National Institute of Drug Addiction, representation of drug use: the erasure of women’s agency as pleasure seekers Within such cultural contexts, what can we know about how women engage drugs as part of embodied pleasures? To ask why we use drugs is to invoke the complexity and spectra of experiences that PWUD have, meanings that reflect embodied experience and engagement with the world

Pleasure in Critical Drug Research

Critical Drug Studies as an Intervention