Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

individual within an oppressive capitalist paradigm. Ahearn alluded to the revolutionary and subversive nature of male drug literature in his analysis of Burroughs’ metaphors of drug addiction as “virus,” “pyramid,” “monopoly,” and “merchandise”:

Junk is quantitative, measurable, the ideal product, the ultimate merchandise, since no sales talk is necessary. The more you use the less you have. “Opium is profane and quantitative like money.” Small wonder that [Burroughs] paraphrases the words of the Communist Manifesto: “Paregoric Babies of the World Unite. We have nothing to lose but Our Pushers.” Burroughs can hardly reach the millions who live in misery and are afflicted with drug addiction in the United States and elsewhere. While the governments of the West trumpet the victory over communism, the drug scourge continues where we live, in an obscene enactment of the arguments of Engels and Marx.³⁸

Ahearn’s analysis of drugs as an oppressive commodity likens male drug literature, such as Burroughs’s, to revolutionary manifestos, with the potential to free a drugged proletariat. However, marginalized representations of women in male drug literature see the genre championing the cause of the alienated male individual. Ironically, therefore, male drug literature, with its concern with the sovereign male subject and (necessarily sustaining) degradation of the female, perpetuates the very structures it rejects.

Multiplicity: (Re-)Presenting Women’s Drug Literature

She lets the other tongue of a thousand tongues speak—the tongue, sound without barrier or death. She refuses life nothing. Her tongue doesn’t hold back but holds forth, doesn’t keep in but keeps on enabling. Where the wonder of being several and turmoil is expressed, she does not protect her self against these unknown feminines; she surprises herself at seeing, being, pleasuring in her gift of changeability. I am spacious singing Flesh: onto which is