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Mad Men, Meth Moms, Moral Panic: Gendering Meth Crimes in the Midwest

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Abstract

This research examines the content of a sample of newspaper articles from the Midwestern states. The analyses find highly gendered accounts of methamphetamine related crimes. Media depictions suggest women use meth for reasons drawn from conventional notions of motherhood, sexuality, and subordination. Alternately, motives of men appear constructed around dominant notions of male criminal virility and the viability of the drug trade. The findings offer a contextual framework to consider how this sort of mediated dichotomy emerges from and reinforces popular notions of gendered crime and drug users in non-urban spaces.

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Notes

  1. States included: Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma.

  2. General Search Terms: men AND man AND methamphetamine, women AND woman AND methamphetamine.

  3. Lexis/Nexis allows retrieved articles to be sorted by relevance. I use this option to ensure that I have examined the most appropriate data and retrieve the first 105 articles in each query.

  4. Newspapers selected are: Omaha (NE) World Herald, Lincoln (NE) Journal Star, Topeka (KS) Capitol Journal, St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch, Kansas City (MO) Star, Tulsa (OK) World. These papers were the most prominent papers available in the Lexis Nexis database.

  5. Therefore this article is associated with at least three of the final categories: manufacture, chemicals/precursors, and attacked or fled police-these categories are not mutually exclusive.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Don Kurtz, Laura Logan, L. Susan Williams, Dana Britton, Donna Selman, David Kauzlarich, Spencer Wood, the editorial staff and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript

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  1. Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, Kansas State University, 204 Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS, 66502, USA

    Travis Linnemann

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  1. Travis Linnemann
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Correspondence to Travis Linnemann.

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Linnemann, T. Mad Men, Meth Moms, Moral Panic: Gendering Meth Crimes in the Midwest. Crit Crim 18, 95–110 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-009-9094-8

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