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Annual Review of Anthropology

Volume 47, 2018

The Gender of the War on Drugs

Abstract

In this review, I explore some of the lines of inquiry that have emerged in anthropology and closely related disciplines around the theme of drugs and gender. The critical research on drugs over the past few decades has tended to focus on how prohibition policies are racialized, which has been important for revealing the injustice and racism found in drug policies and in commonsense notions about drugs and drug use. Drawing from intersectional theorists who have long argued that racial categories are never experienced or imposed as singular identities separate from gender, language, class, and sexuality, I argue in this article that the literature on gender and drugs has struggled with two main interrelated problems: determining () how to understand gender and race together and () how to theorize gender in relation to power when these two factors are often conflated with each other in both popular discourse and theoretical dispositions about the war on drugs.

Keyword(s): feminism, gender, intersectionality, war on drugs
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2018-10-21
2024-04-18
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