Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

suggested, it is an undertaking that does “more than challenge a biased version of literary history: it is to take a political stand and to challenge the propaganda of a dictatorship.”⁷³

It is, perhaps, the assertive and subversive nature of women’s drug literature that makes the silencing of this genre more politically acute. In the first instance, drug literature in general portrays an oppressive relationship between the individual and society in an extreme and challenging way. However, although accounts of the addicted male subject threaten societal structures, accounts of the addicted female subject by women writers threaten the foundations of patriarchal systems in which male drug writing is conducive. Reinstating women’s drug literature provides an opportunity for a more complete picture of oppression that includes the perspective of gender.

In the second instance, I would argue that the political impact of women’s drug literature (and its reinstatement in literary tradition), as opposed to women’s literature in general, is significant in light of its resonance with l’ecriture feminine. By its very nature, women’s drug literature exemplifies the transgressive nature of Cixous’s “feminine writing”: a literature written in order to “smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter.”⁷⁴ “Feminine writing” was to Cixous a transgression from patriarchal cultural traditions: “Now women return from afar, from always: from ‘without,’ from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond ‘culture.’”⁷⁵ The demonization of the female drug user/addict replicates Cixous’s analogy of the witches in their heath. Re/instating women’s drug literature, looking at the Medusa “straight on,” fractures the binary oppositions (within/without) that are held in place by patriarchal literary traditions and therefore has the same explosive political impact as l’ecriture feminine:

If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its