Drug-Consuming Bodies

Abstract

As noted in Chapter 1, I ask in this and the following two chapters the question, ‘How can we develop a feminist embodiment approach to drug use?’ and look at some of the different types of embodiments that are on offer to drug-using women. Already in the previous chapter I used the notion of the consuming body to demonstrate women drug users’ bodies as being the embodiment of female purchasing power in the world of illegal drug use via Tammy Anderson’s (2005) ‘core activities’ theorizing. In that context I looked at drug-using women as consumers of goods and services and strong economic actors and, mostly, at their bodies as resources. I want in this chapter to embed the notion of consuming bodies in the contemporary material culture of illegal drugs. In consumer society, all of us, whether drug using or not, find ourselves constantly constituted in face to face interactions. This is mainly because consumerism and the mass market have blurred the exterior marks of social and personal difference: our lives have become stylized while our bodies have been commodified (Turner, 1996: 122–4).

They are all in trouble today, the mass-circulation magazines, vying fiercely with each other and television to deliver more and more millions of women who will buy the things their advertisers sell. Does this frantic race force the men who make the images to see women only as thing-buyers? Does it force them to compete finally in emptying women’s minds of human thought? …

Betty Friedan (1963: 58)