Drugs and drug policy have been hotly debated since 2018 in relation to the spread of HIV, the impact of drugs on human intellectual capacity, repressive criminal and police systems, the darknet and the internet in general, hip-hop and youth culture, and, of course, soccer and sports. And here's another angle: feminism and drugs. It would seem that these concepts are unrelated, but in their history, in their theoretical and political approaches, they are closely intertwined.
The first wave of feminism
The women's rights movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was very closely linked to its contemporary drug policy and actively intervened in the processes of legislative regulation of drug production and distribution.
Many prominent women's rights activists (Susan B. Many prominent women's rights activists (Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard in the United States, Lily May Atkinson and Kate Sheppard in New Zealand, Emilia Ratu in Sweden) have also been involved in temperance movements promoting abstinence and the prohibition of alcohol, tobacco and other psychoactive substances.
The first wave of feminism
The women's rights movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was very closely linked to its contemporary drug policy and actively intervened in the processes of legislative regulation of drug production and distribution.
Many prominent women's rights activists (Susan B. Many prominent women's rights activists (Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard in the United States, Lily May Atkinson and Kate Sheppard in New Zealand, Emilia Ratu in Sweden) have also been involved in temperance movements promoting abstinence and the prohibition of alcohol, tobacco and other psychoactive substances.
Feminists believed that alcohol use was a cause of physical and emotional abuse by men (spouses and fathers) toward women and children.
Their other arguments: spending on booze drains the budget, negatively affecting family well-being. Binge drinking leads to social disorder, cultural and moral degradation, and damages the health of the nation and its reputation.
On the other hand, as some studies have argued, alcohol use (like opium or tobacco) was an area of legitimate female involvement in public affairs and politics under patriarchy. As a housewife, mother, breadwinner and caretaker, women had power (relative and limited to the private sphere) and could express expert opinions on health, care, family, education, morals, emotions and feelings.
The struggle for sobriety, understood precisely as a concern for the health and well-being of the nation, made it possible to make women's expertise public and thus legitimize women's participation in domestic and international politics.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, issues about the trade in opium and other substances received much attention in colonial and anti-colonial strategies, and women's organizations were actively involved in domestic and international drug policy.
For example, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873 in the United States, by the beginning of the twentieth century already had offices in 52 countries around the world. It fought for tobacco and alcohol prohibition and for women's political rights.
Their other arguments: spending on booze drains the budget, negatively affecting family well-being. Binge drinking leads to social disorder, cultural and moral degradation, and damages the health of the nation and its reputation.
On the other hand, as some studies have argued, alcohol use (like opium or tobacco) was an area of legitimate female involvement in public affairs and politics under patriarchy. As a housewife, mother, breadwinner and caretaker, women had power (relative and limited to the private sphere) and could express expert opinions on health, care, family, education, morals, emotions and feelings.
The struggle for sobriety, understood precisely as a concern for the health and well-being of the nation, made it possible to make women's expertise public and thus legitimize women's participation in domestic and international politics.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, issues about the trade in opium and other substances received much attention in colonial and anti-colonial strategies, and women's organizations were actively involved in domestic and international drug policy.
For example, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873 in the United States, by the beginning of the twentieth century already had offices in 52 countries around the world. It fought for tobacco and alcohol prohibition and for women's political rights.
Moreover, both «news agendas» were inextricably linked: it was believed that only by gaining full political rights could women really effectively address issues of public morals and health.
Christabel Pankhurst, one of England's most famous suffragettes, argued roughly the same thing when she wrote that to eradicate prostitution (another male sin), women should be given the right to vote.
This rhetoric was pervasive and politically effective. Women's organizations that dealt with drug problems and other social ills were recognized nationally and internationally. They succeeded in becoming important sources of expertise in the social spheres they addressed.
The women's movement for sobriety and temperance was very strong.
For example, in New Zealand, the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote (in 1893), it was the local branch of the WCTU that was the most influential and numerous suffragette organization.
Contemporary feminist researchers Annemieke van Drens and Franziska de Haan from the Netherlands believe that women's organizations fighting against social ills invented and put into use a new type of power at the national and international levels — the so-called «power of caring».
Christabel Pankhurst, one of England's most famous suffragettes, argued roughly the same thing when she wrote that to eradicate prostitution (another male sin), women should be given the right to vote.
This rhetoric was pervasive and politically effective. Women's organizations that dealt with drug problems and other social ills were recognized nationally and internationally. They succeeded in becoming important sources of expertise in the social spheres they addressed.
The women's movement for sobriety and temperance was very strong.
For example, in New Zealand, the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote (in 1893), it was the local branch of the WCTU that was the most influential and numerous suffragette organization.
Contemporary feminist researchers Annemieke van Drens and Franziska de Haan from the Netherlands believe that women's organizations fighting against social ills invented and put into use a new type of power at the national and international levels — the so-called «power of caring».
The second wave of feminism
Some women from the second wave of the feminist movement were also interested in the problem of psychoactive substances and their use.
The 1960s and 1970s in the United States were the era of benzodiazepines. Valium (diazepam), a sedative drug prescribed for anxiety, fears, sleep disorders, neuroses, emotional tension and irritability, was particularly popular, but if taken for a long time, it is addictive. However, Valium was considered a relatively safe drug at the time, and doctors were eager to prescribe it to their female patients (often housewives).
According to some reports, up to one-third of all women in the United States at the time had a history of taking benzodiazepines. Feminists called Valium a tranquilizer for women. In their view, such widespread use of the drug meant that women were in uncomfortable conditions: confined to their homes, emotionally and physically overloaded, tired, and stressed.
No wonder many of them suffer from anxiety, insomnia and irritability. The reason for women's unhealthy condition is the patriarchal organization of society, which infringes and limits their rights, their activity, their peace.
But Valium doesn't change the situation — it only makes the oppression itself invisible and allows us to cope with its negative effects. Feminists saw benzodiazepines as a kind of false consciousness machine working to preserve patriarchy. Therefore, the distribution of Valium became a significant object of feminist criticism.
Some women from the second wave of the feminist movement were also interested in the problem of psychoactive substances and their use.
The 1960s and 1970s in the United States were the era of benzodiazepines. Valium (diazepam), a sedative drug prescribed for anxiety, fears, sleep disorders, neuroses, emotional tension and irritability, was particularly popular, but if taken for a long time, it is addictive. However, Valium was considered a relatively safe drug at the time, and doctors were eager to prescribe it to their female patients (often housewives).
According to some reports, up to one-third of all women in the United States at the time had a history of taking benzodiazepines. Feminists called Valium a tranquilizer for women. In their view, such widespread use of the drug meant that women were in uncomfortable conditions: confined to their homes, emotionally and physically overloaded, tired, and stressed.
No wonder many of them suffer from anxiety, insomnia and irritability. The reason for women's unhealthy condition is the patriarchal organization of society, which infringes and limits their rights, their activity, their peace.
But Valium doesn't change the situation — it only makes the oppression itself invisible and allows us to cope with its negative effects. Feminists saw benzodiazepines as a kind of false consciousness machine working to preserve patriarchy. Therefore, the distribution of Valium became a significant object of feminist criticism.
In contrast, some feminists viewed illegal substances as potential allies in the struggle against patriarchal control and the cultural hegemony of masculine values. Andrea Dworkin, one of the most famous and radical representatives of second-wave feminism, wrote in her first book Woman Hating (1974) that through substance use, radical political action, and open sexuality (Dworkin made no secret of her lesbianism), one could get rid of patriarchal and bourgeois attitudes of consciousness.
Women should be likened to medieval witches who not only controlled the production and consumption of drugs (analgesics, hallucinogens, organic amphetamines), but also used them to organize orgies and become animals.
After all, control over substances is also control over corporeality, consciousness, and sexuality. In Dworkin's utopian society, however, control (from the point of view of the repressive patriarchal authority) is abolished altogether: people are free to have sex with animals, the elderly with children, everyone becomes androgynous and takes whatever psychoactive substances they want.
However, Dworkin later rethought her attitude to control and prohibition and herself began to lead a feminist campaign against pornography and commercial sex, and the topic of drugs was no longer touched.
But she was further developed by her opponents.
Women should be likened to medieval witches who not only controlled the production and consumption of drugs (analgesics, hallucinogens, organic amphetamines), but also used them to organize orgies and become animals.
After all, control over substances is also control over corporeality, consciousness, and sexuality. In Dworkin's utopian society, however, control (from the point of view of the repressive patriarchal authority) is abolished altogether: people are free to have sex with animals, the elderly with children, everyone becomes androgynous and takes whatever psychoactive substances they want.
However, Dworkin later rethought her attitude to control and prohibition and herself began to lead a feminist campaign against pornography and commercial sex, and the topic of drugs was no longer touched.
But she was further developed by her opponents.
For example, Annie Sprinkle is a sex-positive feminist who has been a stripper, sex worker, pornographic actress, publisher of a pornographic magazine, writer, director, and more. In 1999, she was invited to speak at a conference on art chemistry, hallucinogens and creativity. In preparation for her talk, Sprinkle wrote an essay on how her use of various psychoactive substances (LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, MDMA, ketamine, ayahuasca, etc.) had transformed her sexuality.
She believed that drugs during sex were used not so much as aphrodisiacs but as tools to expand the boundaries of one's own consciousness and sensuality and to gain new experiences and knowledge about one's sexuality, corporeality and interactions with partners/partners.
Sprinkle agrees that the biochemical effects of sex are much like the effects of taking psychoactive substances. So sex itself is a kind of drug, and drugs affect sexuality and corporeality.
The third wave of feminism
The work of third-wave feminists analyzes illicit substances extensively and productively. British cyberfeminist Sadie Plante has written a book on drugs as secret pleasure, a fantasy of the European Enlightenment. It continually displaces drugs, only for them to then reemerge at the center of cultural and political discourse. American scholar Avital Ronell has developed the concept of drug analysis of literary texts.
She believed that drugs during sex were used not so much as aphrodisiacs but as tools to expand the boundaries of one's own consciousness and sensuality and to gain new experiences and knowledge about one's sexuality, corporeality and interactions with partners/partners.
Sprinkle agrees that the biochemical effects of sex are much like the effects of taking psychoactive substances. So sex itself is a kind of drug, and drugs affect sexuality and corporeality.
The third wave of feminism
The work of third-wave feminists analyzes illicit substances extensively and productively. British cyberfeminist Sadie Plante has written a book on drugs as secret pleasure, a fantasy of the European Enlightenment. It continually displaces drugs, only for them to then reemerge at the center of cultural and political discourse. American scholar Avital Ronell has developed the concept of drug analysis of literary texts.
She also introduced the concept of «being-on-drugs»: its essence is that there is no «sobriety» as such and that to exist is in principle to be influenced by different drugs: substances, ideologies, commodities, advertising images, communication, technology, sociality.
Among the many queer and feminist studies of drugs and drug policies, perhaps the most famous is transgender theorist Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie: sex, drugs and biopolitics. In his view, we live in a society in which politics and power are intertwined and embodied in chemical formulas, hormones, biotechnology, and pornographic images.
Virtual sex, plastic surgery, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, gender reassignment, biomodification, human-induced transformation of the planet's climate...We live in a cyborganic, mutant world where everything is constructed and produced with the help of symbolic and material objects.
The body itself, gender and sexuality are becoming not just objects of sociomaterial construction, but fields of tactics, strategies and conflicts that draw lines of emancipation and lines of new control. Accordingly, the main political question is who has the power to control and manage the flows of substances.
Among the many queer and feminist studies of drugs and drug policies, perhaps the most famous is transgender theorist Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie: sex, drugs and biopolitics. In his view, we live in a society in which politics and power are intertwined and embodied in chemical formulas, hormones, biotechnology, and pornographic images.
Virtual sex, plastic surgery, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, gender reassignment, biomodification, human-induced transformation of the planet's climate...We live in a cyborganic, mutant world where everything is constructed and produced with the help of symbolic and material objects.
The body itself, gender and sexuality are becoming not just objects of sociomaterial construction, but fields of tactics, strategies and conflicts that draw lines of emancipation and lines of new control. Accordingly, the main political question is who has the power to control and manage the flows of substances.
«Alcohol, tobacco, hashish, cocaine, or morphine, just like estrogens and androgens, are neither synthetic tunnels for escaping reality, nor are they mere links between point A and point B. Rather, they are technologies of subjectification, microtechnologies of consciousness, chemical prostheses from which new methods of defining the limits of human recognizability will be produced. Modern subjectivity is the management of one's own intoxication in a chemically harmful environment»
— Paul Preciado. Testo Junkie: Sex drugs and biopolitics, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013
Preciado wrote his book as a partly practical bodily response to the question formulated above. While working on the text, he began using testosterone bought on the black market, the effects of which he compares to the sensations after cocaine and amphetamine. The hormone changes not only the author's corporeality and sexuality, but also his socio-gender status, turning him into a renegade of the official binary system of gender identities.
During the transition and the writing of the book, Preciado was as it were between and outside the categories of the feminine and the masculine. It is also important that this process was not officially registered in any way.
With this gesture, Preciado attempts to show the dual status of psychoactive substances in a pharmacopornographic society. On the one hand, they act as a mechanism of biopolitical control: social institutions can prohibit or force the individual to consume psychoactive substances (hormones and drugs, between which it is not always possible to draw a line), depending on what is necessary for the operation of normalization. On the other hand, the struggle for power turns out to be also a struggle for controlling access to different substances.
The state and capitalism are trying to establish their monopoly in this field, while biohackers, transgender people, drug users and other rebels of the pharmacopornographic world modify their bodies, sexuality, gender, consciousness with various substances and techniques.
They try to escape the control of the dominant order by utilizing and reappropriating its tools.
Contemporary feminism and queer theory analyze drugs situationally, looking at their effects not in themselves, but in specific contexts.
Psychoactive substances can be tools for exploring consciousness and sexuality, a way to transform one's corporeality and gender identity, but they can also act as control mechanisms.
In sum, as always: it's complicated — and there are no simple solutions in feminist drug analysis.
But if you are offered two pills to choose from, take the queer-feminist one.
The state and capitalism are trying to establish their monopoly in this field, while biohackers, transgender people, drug users and other rebels of the pharmacopornographic world modify their bodies, sexuality, gender, consciousness with various substances and techniques.
They try to escape the control of the dominant order by utilizing and reappropriating its tools.
Contemporary feminism and queer theory analyze drugs situationally, looking at their effects not in themselves, but in specific contexts.
Psychoactive substances can be tools for exploring consciousness and sexuality, a way to transform one's corporeality and gender identity, but they can also act as control mechanisms.
In sum, as always: it's complicated — and there are no simple solutions in feminist drug analysis.
But if you are offered two pills to choose from, take the queer-feminist one.