Identities under construction: Women hailed as addicts

Abstract

Despite continuing investigations of the efficacy of Canadian addiction treatment services and supports across a range of health care settings and socio-cultural groups, many systemic, geographic and ideological barriers to service provision for women still exist. Determining how current services and supports can become more congruent with women's gender-specific needs is a current research focus. Drawing on Butler's reformulation of Althusser's interpellation, this article explores the power of hailing, where hailing power lies, and how hailing operates in discourses about addiction that appear in women's talk of their encounters with addiction services and supports. The article briefly outlines Butler's understanding of interpellation and examines ways by which gender operates as both condition and effect in women becoming addicts. I argue that women's narratives reveal patterns of interaction that intersect and generate complex social meanings and identities, and serve to get women's attention in terms of seeing themselves as addicts. Further, I argue that powerful competing discourses concerning gender and the medicalization of addiction, hailed through these interactions, are taken up as lived realities by some women and resisted by others. Knowing how women are hailed to take up as their own, or resist, aspects of traditional and gendered discourses within addiction treatment and recovery communities can inform gender-compassionate service provision.

A house of cards: The long-term recovery experience of former drug-dependent Israeli women

“…This is indicated by the participant's use of "we" in reference to recovering addicts, emphasizing an affiliation that supported her effort to implement the conservation practice of avoiding interaction with drug-using individuals. Thus, her identification as a recovering addict, one that suffers long-term "disease," did not legitimize relapse but rather served to further encourage recovery, in contrast to Aston's (2009) finding that addicted women learned to "hail" themselves as addicts. This example further demonstrates how the different forms of recovery capital are intertwined.…”

A “Special Population” with “Unique Treatment Needs”: Dominant Representations of “Women's Substance Abuse” and Their Effects

“…In so doing, we have added another voice to those calling for more diverse approaches to the study of gender and alcohol and other drugs (Anderson, 2008;Ettorre, 2007;Moore & Measham, 2013), and attempted to provide a starting point for future study. Those interested in exploring the difference that gender makes vis-à-vis substance use would benefit first and foremost from a deeper engagement with more multidisciplinary analyses of gender offered in classic and more recent feminist, social scientific research on the subject (see, for example, Anderson, 2005;Aston, 2009;Ettorre, 2008;Fraser & valentine, 2008;Maher, 1997;Martin, 2011;Measham, 2002;Taylor, 1993;Vitellone, 2003). This research demonstrates that alcohol and other drug use is gendered in complex ways that intersect with other socioeconomic, cultural and political dimensions of women's lives.…”

A Critical Analysis of Interventions for Women Harmed by Others’ Gambling

“…The current findings suggest that gambling services target FAOs in relation to their 'own personal functioning' (e.g., Makarchuk et al, 2002), which is problematic for some women to the extent that they are required to identify themselves as 'dysfunctional' or 'not coping' (at the level of the individual) to access support. In the addictions treatment field, Aston (2009) explored the ways in which women have struggled against similar addiction treatment ideologies that have required them to identify as 'addicts' in order to access support:…”