Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

any remnants of controlling dichotomies. For example, her portrayal of the female addict mocks the dichotomy of virgin saint and whore by conflating (and hence destabilizing) them—that is, canonizing the female addict who relies on prostitution for her fix. Perhaps there is a fatalism present in the poem—but one that is overshadowed by a tone of subversion.

“Muffled” Voices

“Muffled through their history, they have lived in dreams, in bodies (though muted), in silences, in aphonic revolts.”⁷¹ As with women’s literature in general, women’s writing about drug addiction has been silenced by patriarchal cultural traditions. My search for female drug literature felt reminiscent of Dale Spender’s search in the 1980s (and Virginia Woolf’s before her) of mainstream literary publications by women. Spender recalled:

The library catalogue and shelves were filled with books predominantly authored by men. And in the bookshops a steady stream of new and attractively packaged editions of early male novelists helped to reinforce the belief that it was only men who had participated in the initial production of this genre. I neither stumbled across fascinating “old” editions of women’s novels on the library shelves nor found interesting republications when browsing through bookshops…it had to be because women had not written books.⁷²

So it is in the new millennium: female drug literature is scarce in library catalogues and on bookstore shelves—a scarcity that utterly misrepresents the centuries’ worth of novels, poems, plays, and memoirs that have been written and published by women about their drug use and addiction. By re/presenting, re/claiming, and re/valuing women’s literature, and more specifically in relation to this chapter, a genre of women’s literature, is in itself an act of political engagement. It reveals a gender bias in literary and cultural traditions and also destabilizes those same traditions. As Spender