Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

Whose Agency, Whose Crisis?

Without wanting to homogenize male drug literature, a conflation that Derrida suggested would itself “be delirious, indeed narcoticizing,” it is compelling to observe, via character representation, that the individual-in-crisis in much, if not all, male drug literature to date is male.²⁰ That is not to say that there has not been adequate female character representation in the genre of drug addiction literature; there has been, but not in the “canon” of male drug writing. The representation of women drug users and addicts in most male drug texts is often unsubstantial, denigrating, derogatory, and stereotyped. Ahearn alluded to this in his discussion of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch:

As critics have by now come to note, misogyny is the rule. Women are “cunts” or “gashes”, and there are repeated outlandish denigrations of their sexuality: “Nameless female substances, enough to pollute a continent”; “cunt saignant cooked in kotex papillon” (62, 130)…in Naked Lunch…the visionary countertradition in no way opposes the antifemale dimension of mainstream literature; rather it exacerbates it and calls for a feminist response.²¹

Female characters are most often represented in male drug literature as flat, obscure, vague, insignificant, unexplored, silent, unnamed, and without description. Comparatively, male/female representation in male drug literature curtails to the active/passive divide that Helene Cixous warned of in relation to the repressive hierarchy of phallocentric philosophical discourse:

Organization by hierarchy makes all conceptual organization subject to man. Male privilege, shown in the opposition between activity and passivity, which he uses to sustain himself. Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition activity/passivity. There are repercussions. Consulting the history of philosophy—since philosophical discourse both orders and reproduces all thought—one notices that