Women, drugs and popular culture: is there a need for a feminist embodiment perspective?

Illegal drugs have distinct social spaces in popular culture, while public opinions and social attitudes towards drugs use may vary significantly depending upon where, when and who is using drugs as well as the type of drug used. Drugs become visible as culturally shaped substances affecting human behaviour. However, for drug users, while the experience of their drugs use has a symbolic value, they themselves become symbols of deviant, abject individuals. As a threat to white, male, middle class values, drug use is emblematic of one’s failure to engage properly with conventional society. When women are included in this representation, scholars (see, for example, Ettorre 2005, 2004, 1992; Measham 2002; Evans et al. 2002; Raine 2002; Murphy and Rosenbaum 1999; Sterk 1999; Stevens and Wexler 1998; Henderson 1996, 1997, 1999; Hunt, Joe-Laidler and Evans 2002; Anderson 1995, forthcoming; Kandall 1996) challenge traditional assumptions which lack an awareness of gender dynamics in the drugs field. In this shifting context, women appear in the drugs world in different ways than men and connections between women’s pursuits in the illegal and conventional worlds are able to be made (Anderson 1998).