Women and Heroin: The Path of Resistance and Its Consequences

• NCJ Number: 166410
• Journal: Gender and Society Volume: 9 Issue: 4 Dated: (August 1995) Pages: 432-449
• Author(s): J Friedman; M Alicea
• Date Published: 1995
• Length: 18 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: DCC.

Annotation

Based on interviews with primarily white middle-class and upper-class female heroin/methadone users, this study posits a political interpretation of women's involvement with heroin.

Abstract

In the summer of 1990, the researchers gained access to two methadone clinics in the southeastern United States. The researchers conducted open-ended interviews with 30 women. In recalling past experiences and using a "vocabulary of motives" to explain their drug use, respondents engaged in a normal process of continual reconstruction and reinterpretation of their past. Rather than trying to separate the subjects' "true selves" from their descriptions of themselves, the researchers investigated the social forces that shaped and continue to shape this vocabulary of motive. Vocabulary of motive is the discourse people use to explain their actions. These women's explanations of their actions reflect their negotiations between the interpretive frameworks learned in multiple dominant groups and institutions. Because explanations of motive are social phenomena, the women's discourse illuminates how they understand their positions as women and heroin users in different social situations and environments. Using a resistance framework, the researchers note that these women recall their initial heroin use in ways that suggest rejection of restrictive gender and class expectations. Using a dynamic view of resistance, the researchers conclude that these women attempt to resist the dominant cultural discourse through their heroin use and to reinterpret their experiences with heroin. These women have rejected restrictive gender and class expectations. Once established in the drug social world, these women describe the experiences of gender and class pressures they were trying to avoid in their initial drug use. Faced with problems within the heroin social world, women in the study turned to methadone clinics, where the discourse they learned for understanding their heroin "addiction" implicated them and not the dominant society as the source of their problems. The study shows that these women maintain multiple interpretive frameworks for constructing their identities and resisting class and gender domination. 4 notes and 42 references