Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

construes [women] as the limit or border-line of that order…women will then come to represent the necessary frontier between man and chaos, …[and] women seen as the limit of the symbolic order will… [then] share in the disconnecting properties of all frontiers: they will be neither inside nor outside, neither known or unknown.³⁴

It is this position, as Toril Moi explained,

which has enabled male culture to sometimes vilify women as representing darkness and chaos, to view them as Lilith or the Whore of Babylon, and sometimes to elevate them as the representations of a higher and purer nature, to venerate them as virgins and mothers of god. In the first instance the borderline is seen as part of the chaotic wilderness outside, and in the second it is seen as an inherent part of the inside: the part which protects and shields the symbolic order from imaginary chaos.³⁵

Coinciding with this positionality of the drugged feminine, the politics of drug addiction, played out in policy, relies on “fantastic figures of female addiction”—“the ‘morphine mothers’ and ‘opium vampires’ of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century; the ‘enemies within’ and the ‘girl drug addicts’ of the 1950s, the ‘heroin mothers’ of the 1970s, and the ‘crack moms’ of more recent memory.”³⁶

Male literary representations of female addicts reinstate these images, embedded in and reflective of patriarchal political assumptions, structures, and policies. If, as Campbell suggested, “illicit drug use among women…is a political shorthand by which our culture anxiously encodes notions of social decay and deviance,” then male drug literature perpetuates this notion.³⁷ Furthermore, in each of the examples of male drug literature, the degraded and degrading representations of female drug addicts are positioned in the margins by the fully explored descriptions of male characters—the irony being that it is the very act of repressive marginalization that male drug literature is deemed to deflect. That is, male drug literature exemplifies and illuminates the cause of the alienated (male)