Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

addicts by reinstating female writers’ own accounts of their addiction. As such, it focuses on gender-specific reactions to drug addiction that demonstrate a more varied and complex view of women and addiction. This genre of female drug literature resonates with Helene Cixous’s call for “l’ecriture feminine” (feminine writing) in her works Newly Born Woman (1975) and The Laugh of the Medusa (1975). As Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan suggested, “Drawing on Derrida’s critique of metaphysics, Cixous describes the tradition of gender representation as an oppositional one in which all that connotes women is portrayed as being secondary to male rationalist principles.”² “Feminine writing” is described as “a new paratactic style of expression that would give voice to all that Western rationalism has repressed.”³ I suggest that the multiplicity of female drug writing encapsulates Cixous’s notion of feminine writing which “ultimately celebrates that which in women has been denigrated for centuries.”⁴ It is Cixous’s reclamation of Medusa, represented in phallocentric philosophical discourse as the epitome of female degradation and hence denigration, that aligns with similar phallocentric notions and representations of the female addict. Cixous suggested that “you only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”⁵ A more “complete” comparative analysis of the representations of women and addiction which includes women’s own accounts looks at literary representations of the female addict “straight on.”

This chapter first presents the portrayals of the female addict in male drug literature. Secondly, it re/presents women’s writing which subverts stereotyped representations of women and addiction, magnifying the patriarchal assumptions and structures on which the stereotypes are based. Thirdly, it challenges the silencing of women’s drug literature within the paradigm of literary and cultural traditions. This chapter can be seen, then, as fracturing the universalizing notions and representations of the female addict, enabling multiple narratives of the female subject/self as a complex being to be heard, and disrupting the stabilization, regulation, uniformity, and constraint of patriarchal literary and cultural traditions. In this, a more