Pushing Back the Walls: The Politics of Maneuver in Women’s Drug Rehabilitation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses participant-observation research from the women’s floor of a residential drug-treatment program in Queens, New York City, to explore how rehabilitative institutions instantiate and extend carceral geographies, practices, and design, despite their asserted “alternative to incarceration” status. Focusing on two aspects of rehabilitation architecture – routinization/orderliness and therapeutic quarantine/containment – I show how the spatial politics of rehabilitation enforce drug use as a pathological, criminological problem of racialized–gendered deviance that must be corrected through isolation, “habilitation,” and punitive discipline. Against these violent constructions, criminalized women who use drugs experimented with ways of being for themselves and each other that moved against how the rehab attempted to contain, sever, and reorient their desires. Using the examples of sleep, bodily adornment, and bedroom decor, I argue that criminalized women intervened in, commented on, and sometimes resisted carceral spatial practices of rehabilitation.

Keywords:

• war on drugs
• rehabilitation
• incarceration
• race
• gender
• abolition
• aesthetics

Acknowledgements

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers T32DA037801 and T32DA007233. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms. Conversations reproduced here were reconstructed from fieldnotes.

2 According to the model of therapy provided at Rising from the Ashes, work is a form of therapy: “Job functions strengthen affiliation with the program through participation, provide opportunities for skills development, and foster self-examination and personal growth through performance challenge and program responsibility” (de Leon 1994, 21). Labor as therapeutic discipline traces back to the eighteenth-century workhouse and poorhouse, the nineteenth-century penitentiary (e.g. Auburn), and the early-twentieth century Narcotic Farm (e.g. Lexington).

3 Meranze describes this as a process through which the body of the imprisoned person was “evacuated of its symbolic importance … to inculcate new bodily dispositions. Consequently, prison officials repeatedly struggled to control [imprisoned people’s] hygiene, sexual behavior, labor patterns and speech. Late-eighteenth-century reformers assumed that fixing the habits of the body, would, in turn, fix moral character” (1996, 174). Here I am interested in how these disciplinary processes can be experienced as the affective state of boredom, or an interiorization of the sensory deprivation meant to produce new bodily comportments.

4 Although I’m thinking alongside work in queer affect theory, which asks us to sit with why and how people embody negative or un-recuperated emotions, and what this might tell us about ongoing violence (cf. Cvetkovich 2012), I am most interested in how sleep as a passive way of resisting also resists our desires to find something “productive” in the refusal to embody positive feelings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot is a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University and received their Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2022. Focusing on the experiences of trans and cis working class women, primarily women of color, who use drugs, their work exposes how liberal imaginaries of rehabilitation actually function to extend carceral punishment under new, “gender-responsive,” “therapeutic” guise. They are the author of “A Trans Way of Seeing,” co-authored with Kitty Jayne Rotolo (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2022). [email protected] [email protected]