Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

though, male drug literature has focused only on the male subject. The female subject in male drug literature is undervalued by enduring stereotypes of the female addict as “passive, exploited or degraded.”¹ Male drug literature underwrites or ignores the complexities of women’s addiction. Ironically, by doing this, male drug literature reaffirms the very repression it critiques.

In order to present a complete view of humanity, a full account of the alienated subject, it was necessary to first locate women’s own writing about addiction. Unlike the accessible “canon” of male drug literature, female drug literature had not seemed to be even formed as a genre. The research for this chapter did, however, uncover a trove of writing by women about their addiction to and use of drugs. In particular, Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz’s anthology Sisters of the Extreme (2000), a revised edition of the 1982 anthology Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady, suggests a rich history of female writing dedicated to women and addiction. Each excerpt subverts stereotypes of the female addict as passive, degraded, or exploited. For example, the voice in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “A True Dream” (1833) is one of assertiveness; Emily Hahn’s memoir, The Big Smoke (1950), portrays a woman who actively decides to become an opium addict; and Lenore Kendal’s poem “Blues for Sister Sally” (1967) can be read as one of subversion and political protest. Although the anthology is abundant, including nearly one hundred excerpts of women’s writing about drug use and addiction, there are numerous female writers who are not included, such as Linda Yablonsky, Leonie Stevens, Ellen Hopkins, and Sara Gran, to name a few. Such omissions, due in part to the timing of the publication of the anthology, only highlight the great quantity of texts and the continuation of this genre of literature and therefore intensify the question as to why the genre has gone relatively unnoticed and unexamined in critical literary tradition.

This chapter, with its necessary focus on Palmer and Horowitz’s anthology, attempts to deconstruct stereotypes of female drug users and