Feminized Need and Racialized Danger: Punitive Therapeutics and Historical Addiction Tropes in a Midwestern Drug Court

Teresa Gowan, University of Minnesota
Veronica Horowitz, State University of New York at Buffalo

The proliferation of drug courts has gained bi-partisan favor as a therapeutic, cost-effective alternative to mass incarceration. Using ethnographic discourse analysis, our intersectional comparison of a large Midwestern drug court complicates previous accounts by demonstrating how gender and race serve to mark differentiated rehabilitative projects. These projects show strong continuities with historical addiction tropes in both popular culture and criminological discourse. In our primarily white and African-American court, requirements and differential treatment re-inscribe the historical polarization between "white slaves" and "drug zombies," This lives on between the trauma of the female (and especially white) "involuntary addict" and the strong, dangerous agency of the (racialized) male "criminal addict." An explicit gender differentiation, prescribing therapy for women and hard work for men, was thus complicated by a cross-cutting racial differences. Patterns of talk therapy for white women and neuro-scientific medicalization for white men stood sharply apart from a project of deep racio-cultural reform for African-Americans. Women of color were encouraged to take on intensive child rearing and other traits of normative femininity, while men of color were subjected to the highest surveillance and suspicion, their struggles in the labor and housing markets misrecognized as "cultural" recalcitrance.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 234. Gender, Race and Immigration