Den flygande maran : En studie om åtta narkotikabrukande kvinnor i Stockholm

Between April 1997 and November 1999, I followed eight socially excluded female drug users in an attempt to describe their lives and living conditions. The study employs an ethnographic approach with the focus being directed at the specific woman and her life in relation to the social context where this life is lived. The study’s objective has been to describe the lives and living conditions of the eight drug-using women, as well as the extent of the opportunities available to them, as being determined by mechanisms of social exclusion. Their lives are understood on the basis of a feminist and social constructionist perspective where perceptions of ‘the drug-abusing woman’ are regarded as the result of constructions of gender and deviance. The theoretical perspectives proceeds from the idea that one is not born a woman but rather becomes one. The fundamental idea is that women become women by means of processes of femininisation, in the context of which certain ways of interpreting and presenting oneself as a woman are regarded as good and others as bad. Our images of ‘the female drug addict’ are based on how we define and interpret deviance and on the cultural and social thought and behaviour patterns we ascribe to people on the basis of bodily differences. It is images of ‘the good woman’ that defines what we regard as characteristic of ‘the bad woman’ and vice versa. The findings are organised into three main topics: femininity, living conditions and social control. The main findings are: The women described themselves as women by relating to normative messages about how women “are and should be”, and their drug use constituted a means of coping with life from their social position. Their life revolved to a large extent around money via a constant struggle to find enough to cover the rent, food and other basic necessities. And finally, how the women’s relations to societal institutions were formed by their social position as ‘female drug addicts’ and how the asymmetry of these relations produced certain fixed patterns of action for the parties involved.

Ideological Closure : Drug Prevention in a Post-political Society

The aim of this thesis is to critically examine drug prevention as a field of problematizations  – how drug prevention becomes established as a political technology within this field, how it connects to certain modes of governance, how and under which conditions it constitutes it’s problematic, the questions it asks,  it´s implications in terms of political participation and representation, the various bodies of knowledge through which it constitutes the reality upon which it acts, the limits it places on ways of being, questioning, and talking  in the world. The main analyses have been conducted in four separate but interrelated articles. Each article addresses a specific dimension of drug prevention in order to get a grasp of how this field is organized. Article 1 examines the shift that has occurred in the Swedish context during the period 1981–2011 in how drugs have been problematized, what knowledge has grounded the specific modes of problematization and which modes of governance this has enabled. In article 2, the currently dominant scientific discipline in the field of drug prevention – prevention science – is critically examined in terms of how it constructs the “drug problem” and the underlying assumptions it carries in regard to reality and political governance. Article 3 addresses the issue of communities’ democratic participation in drug prevention efforts by analyzing the theoretical foundations of the Communities That Care prevention program. The article seeks to uncover how notions of community empowerment and democratic participation are constructed, and how the “community” is established as a political entity in the program. The fourth and final article critically examines the Swedish Social and Emotional Training (SET) program and the political implications of the relationship the program establishes between the subject and emotions. The argument is made that, within the field of drug prevention, questions of political values and priorities in a problematic way are decoupled from the political field and pose a significant problem in terms of the possibilities to engage in democratic deliberation. Within this field of problematizations it becomes impossible to mobilize a politics against social injustice, poverty and inequality. At the same time, the scientific grounding of this mode of governing the drug “problem” acts to naturalize a specific – highly political – way of engaging with drugs.