Lunch Lecture - Nancy D. Campbell: Gendering Addiction: The Visual Iconography of Drug Use

The visual iconography of opiate addiction is deeply gendered. Men who use opiates are depicted as becoming vulnerable as they proceed into dependence, an English word historically used to de-stigmatize an older moral lexicon of “addiction.” Drug-using women are depicted as hardening up and more stubbornly addicted than male counterparts. They are impossible to “normalize” because their gender deviance flouts social norms. Women’s non-medical use of opiates is persistently portrayed as unnatural, deviant, always out of place. Contrast this to women who use legal pharmaceutical drugs, who are portrayed as using drugs as technologies to bring their urges under social control. This lecture will examine changes in gendered regimes of representation, including those of neuroscience.