Drug-Using Reproducing Bodies

Abstract

Hopefully, readers will have a developing sense that over the past decades, indeed centuries, scientific and biomedical discourses on the body have become rooted in contemporary culture. As social scientists begin to position bodies centrally in their approaches to society and culture (E. Martin, 1992; Turner, 1996; Frank, 1995; Shilling, 2005; Featherstone, 1982; Davis, 1997; Bordo, 1993a; 1993b), natural scientists and biomedical experts persist with creating techniques to alter the boundaries of these bodies and attempt to close up the spaces between them. Often this has meant that social issues are not only allowed but also forced to emigrate to our bodies. Perhaps you the reader are beginning to see that the at times troubling social and cultural issue of drug use is emigrating in this way. In effect, we have all unwittingly become members of a captive audience to the cultural spectacle of drug use. Of course for drug-using women this spectacle has damaging consequences.

Patriarchal childbirth — childbirth as penance and as medical emergency — and its sequel, institutionalized motherhood, is alienated labor, exploited labor, keyed to an ‘efficiency’ and a profit system having little to do with the needs of mothers and children, carried on in physical and mental circumstances over which the woman in labor has little or no control. It is exploited labor in a form even more devastating than that of the enslaved industrial worker who has at least no psychic and physical bond with the sweated product, or with the bosses who control her. Not only have conception, pregnancy and birth been expropriated from women, but also the deep paraphysical sensations and impulses with which they are saturated.

Adrienne Rich (1977: 163)