Keywords

Proximity to drugs is necessary if they are to be used, but illegal drugs are not necessarily available in the contexts where interviewees want to be. Proximity to drugs can also be a sensitive issue, as the previous chapter showed. So how do women acquire drugs? In this chapter, I take a closer look at the different ways in which the women orientate themselves so that the drugs are close enough to be introduced into their bodies.

1 Out on the Town

When Nanne recalls smoking marijuana as a hippie in the city of Malmö during the 1970s, she gives a picture of how the street drug market has changed.

Nanne::

There used to be dealers on Gustav Adolf Square, right in the middle of Gustav Adolf Square. That was before they moved to the car park next to the police station. [laughs]

Emma::

What did the police do then?

Nanne::

Nothing. [pauses]

Emma::

When was this?

Nanne::

The seventies. Then they decamped to Kungsparken. Swedes hardly knew what cannabis was in the sixties. It was legal.[Footnote 1] And the sheer number of ‘em on Gustav Adolf Square!

Emma::

Yeah?

Nanne::

Ooh yes! Chock-a-block. And then the police station’s car park.Footnote 2

Nanne chuckles when she recalls how dealers used to shift their wares in the car park next to the police station on Davidshall Square, in the centre of Malmö, during the seventies. She finds it remarkable that they used to do business in places that today constitute the teeming heart of Malmö’s shopping district. We are curled up on the sofa in Nanne’s terraced house in the sleepy, seaside district of Limhamn in Malmö, sipping coffee and nibbling on biscuits. Remembering back, she startles from time to time, laughing in wonder as she searches her memory and recalls the past. Gustav Adolf Square, Nanne says, and later the police car park were places where people used to hang out and she enthusiastically describes the various qualities of hash on offer:

you’d buy these small slabs. There’d be Moroccan [hash] and Afghan, and there’d be… all these different kinds. You knew what country it was from. […] Lebanese, that was… top-class stuff. [laughs] That one was black.

While her tone is casual, there is an undercurrent of pensiveness and defiance in her voice. Nanne, a 65-year-old white woman, views her memories of the seventies through the lens of how it is now, imagining what it would be like if drugs were still being dealt in those squares in a similarly bohemian way today, and concluding that it would be absurd. When the media reported on the cannabis trade in Malmö during the time when I was conducting the interviews, the focus was usually on the trade’s link to gangs, crime and bloody acts of violence.Footnote 3 International studies of street trade in the 2000s paint a picture of drug markets that bear little resemblance to Nanne’s laid-back hippie experiences. Campbell and Ettorre write that “what was once a largely innocuous, consensual, consumer market has been transformed into what is routinely described in policy terms as a war zone” (2011, p. 22). Criminologist Letizia Paoli (2002) and sociologist Sandra Bucerius (2007) report that the illegal drug market in modern-day Europe is highly racialised, gendered and riddled with violence (see also Nafstad 2011). Norwegian sociologist Sveinung Sandberg also stresses the racialised structure of the drug market:

The lowest and most dangerous positions are increasingly taken over by foreigners, both those who immigrated recently and second and third generation migrants. (2008, p. 609)

Nanne posits that “cannabis isn’t a drug”, which is her way of saying that she is not of the opinion that using cannabis should be illegal. But her quote at the start of this chapter shows that the drug trade has changed—and with it the cultural meaning of being in the vicinity of the cannabis market. Or, as Ahmed writes:

What is at stake […] is not only the relation between the body and “what” is near, but also the relation between the things that are near. […] Orientations are binding as they bind things together. What puts objects near depends on histories, on how things arrive, and on how they gather in their very availability as things to do things with. (2006a, p. 558)

Orienting oneself towards a drug means orienting towards a cluster of objects: the drugs themselves and the objects, including people, that surround them, which have all, in different ways, arrived at the same place. What was within Nanne’s reach when she was a hippie is now foreign and distant, because the objects that surround the drugs sold on the streets these days are no longer the same.

These days, cannabis that is meant to be smoked does not cross Nanne’s path, despite her liberal attitude to the drug. Instead, she buys CBD oil online and has a prescription for opiate painkillers to relieve the ache in her hips. The post office and the pharmacy thus constitute the meeting points towards which Nanne orients herself.

In parallel to the pharmacy trade, the illegal street market for drugs has prospered and becomes more ruthless with each subsequent attempt to shut it down (Tham 2003; Farber 2021). It is a particular scene in which one can expect a certain set of objects, all aligned with each other, and approaching these objects is risky. Pharmacies’ commercialised retail environment, with its colourful packaging and smiling personnel in white coats, means that Sweden’s two main drug markets are worlds apart. Comparing them, it is easy to lose sight of the actual substances’ effects and chemical make-up.

1.1 A Gendered, Classed and Racialised Street Market

The drug market does not only have a racialised structure but also a classed and gendered one (Buxton et al. 2020; Maher 1997; Grundetjern and Sandberg 2012). In his analysis of 20 men who sold drugs on the streets of Oslo, Sveinung Sandberg (2008) uses Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to explain how the social space of the drug market is created by men who, through early bodily experiences of violence and exclusion—such as war, being refugees, being subjected to racism and/or experiences of living on the streets—have gained a symbolic capital that can be transformed into money and status in the context of Norwegian drug sales. Sandberg argues that the young men who sought out the open drug trade scene found both commercial and socially viable ways to manage their “street capital”, in contrast to the marginalised position of being racialised, poor and lacking viable cultural capital in white societies (Sandberg 2008; Sandberg and Pedersen 2011). Sandberg cites their readiness to use violence and their American hip-hop artist-inspired performative masculinity (2008, p. 612) as examples of their gendered capital, which they acquired by living through violence and marginalisation. When these men draw on this habitus to increase their capital, however, it simultaneously entrenches their position at the bottom of both the drug-trade hierarchy and a racialised society.

While (impoverished, racialised) men have become the face of the drug trade in the West, however, the cultural perception of women in the Scandinavian drug market centres around a completely different activity: obtaining drugs. Feminised terms for a person who uses drugs—such as tjackhora (“speed whore”), knarkarluder (“junkie hooker”) or sprutluder (“needle hooker”)—link drug use to another activity, selling sex and the stigmatised identity of a whore. Certain drugs in particular, such as heroin, are widely associated with the sex trade, as Elizabeth Ettorre writes:

Whether or not a woman heroin addict has ever exchanged her body for drugs or money for her habit, she is characterized as an impure woman, an evil slut or a loose female. (1992, p. 78)

Ettorre suggests that, since women’s bodies have always been judged on the basis of ideals shaped by historical, scientific, medical and capitalist ideas, women who use drugs are not only forced to try and live up to these ideals, but also to do so from a marked position (or a position in which they risk becoming marked). She emphasises that a marked body that deviates from the norm is regarded as socially and morally inferior, and concludes that any feminist analysis of women’s drug use must pay attention to embodiment (2015, p. 795).

Ettorre’s focus on embodiment aligns with the phenomenological perspective, which begins with the body moving through a certain space—a place with a past and a present, which affect how the body is interpreted. Ahmed describes how spaces that have historically been spaces of whiteness—such as the academic world—have been shaped into whiteness. When such spaces are visited by a racialised body, others already in the space take note, which can make the non-white visitor feel uncomfortable or conspicuous (2007, p. 157). In a male-dominated drugs world, women stand out, and their feelings of discomfort help to preserve the shape of these spaces. Writing about women’s dual deviance, Ettorre concludes that “‘normal’ embodiment is foreclosed to women drug users” (2015, p. 794). I interpret Ettorre’s term “women drug users” as referring to the class-related position of the abuser and the knarkare, someone who cannot be discreet.

Obtaining drugs, in other words, is a challenging act, not least for women. So how do women navigate between the different worlds they encounter when obtaining drugs, such as the drug market and the contexts where they use drugs?

2 In One’s Own Social Circle

Most of the women I talked to said that they avoided the open drug market, but neither did anyone say they engaged in online purchasing, which has been described as a potentially attractive market for women buyers, due to the relative anonymity and possible avoidance of face-to-face meetings (Fleetwood et al. 2020). Instead, the women referred to the street market when they discussed the option of obtaining drugs from strangers. Madelene, for example, reluctantly imagines what it would be like to foray into the open, illegal drug market to purchase heroin:

I think I’d be pretty terrified if I were forced to head to Brunnsparken – something I would never do. But I’d be just as afraid of the police as I would be of the dealers.

Purchasing drugs in public would remind her that her actions are illegal and a punishable offence. She has no desire to put herself in such a situation. Instead, she gets her drugs from a man she knows and who therefore is not perceived as a threat. Without that familiarity, she says, she would never buy illegal drugs. When I ask her whether she thinks she will ever stop using heroin, she responds:

if I reached a point in life where I wouldn’t be able to. Like when I worked abroad for extended periods of time. It’s not like I went looking for a new dealer in Milan just because I happened to be there for a year. Then I just don’t bother. Or when I’m working in the US, it’s not like [laughs at the mere thought] I’d ever dare do anything like that.

So Madelene orients herself away from the open drug market. For an encounter to take place, drugs have to be available via something or someone with whom she is familiar.

Thea describes her drug purchases in a similar way, without specifying which drugs she is talking about (not heroin, however, since she does not use heroin):

Thea::

I’m not that fond of the whole drugs-buying thing, really, I actually find it quite stressful… Doing deals is awful, really. [laughs]

Emma::

How do you buy drugs then?

Thea::

No, I get them through… people I know. Because I’ve been around for a while, I’ve got […] I have friends who… I know who’s got stuff.

Thea describes “doing deals”—negotiating and conducting illegal transactions with strangers—as “awful”. During another interview, she tells me that she is uncomfortable in heteronormative settings in general, being a queer woman and a political and progressive artist (cf. Brennan 2020). She insists on spending her time exclusively in environments in which she feels safe.

I already only engage with a… limited circle of people. [tentative laugh] A circle that I’ve cultivated myself [takes a breath], both on purpose and… not on purpose. So life will be tolerable. I avoid heterosexual settings. I do everything I can to avoid them. Have done so for many years, really. Or, a long time. A very, very long time. Because I need to.

Perhaps part of the reason why she finds “doing deals” so awful is because it requires her to step outside of the familiar, queer settings where she tells me she needs to be for life to be tolerable. The queer interviewees in criminologist Fiona Hutton’s (2006) study also describe uneasiness in nightlife settings that strongly emphasise heterosexuality as the norm. Hutton quotes the women she talked to as saying they prefer not to buy drugs from male dealers:

Investigation around the source of the drugs taken by female clubbers showed that it was mainly from friends or “friends of friends” that ecstasy was obtained, not from the stereotypical, dangerous, unscrupulous male dealer. (Hutton 2006, p. 79)

Despite the different ways in which they use drugs, both Madelene and Thea mainly purchase them from acquaintances—a pattern that reflects Hutton’s study. By doing so, my interviewees ensure that the objects around drugs constitute a familiar collection towards which they orient themselves.

But how did the drugs arrive there (Ahmed 2006b, p. 37)? When cocaine comes up in our conversation, Thea reflects upon that very issue:

It’s all unethical, of course, but cocaine is incredibly unethical. Chemicals can be created in a lab. Best-case scenario, MDMA even comes from a legal lab. But most of it comes from… Cocaine is transported in people’s, you know, rectums.

Between the lines, Thea is saying she hopes the MDMA (and other chemically produced drugs) that she uses will have been produced and transported in ethically justifiable ways, but that she does not believe this is often the case. The issues for which cocaine is notorious—drug cartels resorting to violence, trafficking the drug via impoverished bodies—pose an ethical dilemma for her. Ahmed writes that queer phenomenology not only needs to take into account a body’s orientation towards certain objects, but also these objects’ backgrounds: how they arrived where they are, encountering that body. From the perspective of the body, a person’s orientation towards a certain kind of drug encounter will determine what that person’s drug use will look like. For Thea, the drugs path to the places where she encounters them is in the background. She can only picture fragments of their journey, like legal laboratories or drug mules smuggling cocaine in their rectums. But even if she had wanted to, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, for her to discover how a drug had actually made its way into her hands. When she orients herself towards drugs by turning to acquaintances in her social circle, however, she can avoid both the discomfort of “doing deals” and being reminded of drugs’ potentially unethical journeys. Thus, both Thea and Madelene consciously turn their backs on the drug market that Campbell and Ettorre (2011) describe as “a war zone”, and the kinds of places where Sandberg’s racialised interviewees face violence and exclusion. They travel familiar paths. Instead of meeting different worlds, they meet familiar faces along the way: people who serve as a link between the drug market and buyers who prefer to remain in their own social circle. It is a drug world embedded within the world they themselves inhabit.

The end buyer and end consumer can be one and the same person, but this does not necessarily need to be the case. Drugs can also transition from being a commodity in a market to being part of a gift economy.

3 Drugs as Gifts

For a person to be able to use something, that thing needs to be within their reach: the body needs to be in the vicinity of the thing it wants to use. But for a person to be able to use a drug in their vicinity, additional proximity is required: the drug needs to be actively inserted into the body. Ettorre criticises drug researchers for parroting the idea that “true substance abusers” are men who decisively take action, while women merely play passive supporting roles (1992, p. 17). This creates a simplified picture of women as passive and motionless. Yet the interviewees talk about intentions and how those intentions incited movement: burning desire, strategies to get their hands on drugs, travel, nightlife and parties. The women I talked to turn towards certain drugs and away from others, avoiding them or consuming them and allowing themselves to be influenced. These encounters occur because drugs move towards them, but also because they themselves simultaneously move towards drugs. Several of the women reported that the majority of the drugs they use are given to them, which adds an additional layer of complexity to these encounters. How can we interpret this receiving of drugs in the context of gender? How do drug gift economies work?

Agnes does not seem concerned when she tells me how she obtains the drugs she uses:

Agnes::

I’ve got almost everything for free… all the time.

Emma::

Who gives you drugs then?

Agnes::

[reflects] I can barely remember how I… whether they were bought, to be honest. Most of the time it was with friends, through friends… but if we bought anything… I never did. I’d give my friend money, and then she would just go off, like. I never bought any myself or had any at home or anything.

Based on this quote, it may seem that Agnes is relatively inexperienced with drugs. She says that she does not really know how the drugs get to her and, on the occasions when she has paid for them, the transactions have been through intermediaries. But Agnes has been using drugs for ten years, to such an extent that she herself, her family and her friends have all been concerned about her health. How does this add up? Agnes says the acquisition happens in the background, and it is so non-central that she does not even remember how it happens. Even when friends buy drugs on her behalf, they take the money and walk away. To her mind, the drugs seem to present themselves as expected objects within a narrow field of vision, and she has not noticed how they got there. In this way, Agnes’ drug use resembles the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological practice at his desk, as theorised by Sara Ahmed. Ahmed describes how, when Husserl discusses objects, he exemplifies with writing paper and other writing equipment. The examples are no coincidence, according to Ahmed, because Husserl is a philosopher who writes on paper.

what we can see in the first place depends on which way we are facing. What gets our attention depends too on which direction we are facing. (2006b, p. 29)

Husserl thus focuses on his own work when he keeps his face turned towards the writing paper. Without looking, he also describes himself as knowing what is in the parts of the room he cannot see, behind him and outside the room. In contrast, Ahmed writes, Husserl does not pay attention to the labour behind his ability to write—the labour of making the table, cleaning it and taking care of his children, whom he can hear through the wall, for example (ibid., pp. 30–31). Writing is the focus and the desk is obviously in front of him, as he is a philosopher. I will return to the way in which Agnes simply assumes that people will give her drugs and to her comment about never having had any drugs in her own home, but first I would like to explore the relationship between gift economies, gender and class in greater depth.

When it comes to gifts, there is extensive ethnological and anthropological research theorising the social and cultural systems of which giving and receiving are part. Perhaps the most influential gift theorist, anthropologist Marcel Mauss, examines different gift systems in his book The Gift, first published in 1925 (2002Footnote 4). Understanding these as relationships of which the objects commonly perceived as “gifts” are only part, he concludes that, unlike goods in a market, gifts are never free. They come with obligatory demands for reciprocation, which he interprets as related to their spirituality in a so-called total system. By this, he means that the gift relationship is part of a system that includes everything from religion and myth to legal, economic and social structures. The gift reflects something of the donor who, in a spiritual sense, becomes part of what is given, and this spiritual part wants to return to its origin, that is, the original donor (ibid. 2002, pp. 13–16). The relationship involves three basic requirements: to give, to receive and to reciprocate. The latter obligation ties individuals, families and groups together, forging relationships and solidarity.

When it comes to women in drug-related contexts, there are strong beliefs about the sexual availability of drug-using women (e.g. Du Rose 2015, pp. 26ff.). It is therefore easy to imagine that gift economies in drug contexts are gendered and sexualised in such a way that men provide drugs and women reciprocate with sex. This is in line with Mauss’ view of heterosexual relationships—namely, as a relationship which has always meant that men continuously reciprocate women’s provision of sex through gifts (2002, p. 93). In the drug context, such an exchange would take on a morally charged character through the ways in which drug-using women are conceptualised. In Swedish, these are manifested, for example, in concepts that denote drug-using women, such as knarkarhora (“knark whore”) and sprutluder (“needle hooker”). The term “whore” is traditionally used, as shown by Frykman (1977) and Lennartsson (2019), to denote an unclean and therefore threatening female position, rather than to describe a woman’s exchange of sex for money. And the terms that denote drug-using women appear to do just that, giving them far-reaching meanings of dirt, menace and sex trafficking. Conceptions of drug-using women as sexually available also exist within some drug-using contexts, as Carolina points out. She says that the men who provided amphetamines expected her to be “nice”, and also describes how this type of socialising could turn into both unwelcome sexual advances and reluctant sexual acts.

just obvious things that I experienced, like… sexual situations that didn’t feel quite right and… and stuff and it just seemed almost like a given in that… world, sort of. Like, maybe, you know, being with someone who… gave you drugs…

Sociologist Torkel Richert (2009) writes about women who inject regularly, and that women more often than men state that part of their drug consumption consists of gifts. More than half of the 188 women Richert interviewed had been offered drugs in the past two weeks, and of these, 95% had received drugs from at least one man, while 40% had received drugs from at least one woman (ibid., p. 377). He suggests that these gifts may relate to some extent to the expectation of receiving sexual favours, but also points out that more men than women use drugs and that there seems to be a more general “culture of treating one another” (ibid., p. 376) in the drug contexts he has studied.

Unlike Agnes, Madelene and Thea, but much like the women in Richert’s study, Carolina was part of a socially marginalised context, where drugs are sought in the vicinity of violence and crime. The “world” that Carolina mentions in the above quotation is a world with a class-determined relationship structure that includes both orienting intoxication experiences and disorientation in relation to the rest of society, and a criminal, violent market trade. Agnes, Madelene and Thea, on the other hand, describe their drug use as places defined by highs that are removed from that world, albeit still with a charged connection to it. Both Agnes and Carolina mainly use amphetamines. But the ways in which they obtain them—the points where they meet drugs—are strikingly different. Carolina had arranged her life in a manner that ensured she would always be able to pay for the drugs she took. She tells me that she made sure to make ends meet, despite her drugs habit negatively affecting her ability to work, by switching jobs before her drug use could be revealed:

I [worked] in restaurants. In the kitchen mostly, as a cook and pantry cook. Kitchen assistant… You just go from job to job and keep going that way. That’s what allows you to keep finding work, switching all the time.

The aim behind Carolina’s strategy of always having a steady job as a source of income was to make herself as immune as possible to sexual pressure and expectations. She recounts, for example, how some men who sold drugs tried to convince her to give heroin a try, thinking it would make her give up her restaurant jobs and instead “take a job” with them as someone who, as she describes it, would act as a kind of sexually available maid in exchange for drugs.

there were people who tried to persuade me to do it [use heroin] because it’s good to have a girl who hangs around the flat and gets hooked [addicted to the drug], and then they can be there and do the dishes and clean and all that sort of thing… and then it’s not … like, prostitution, selling sex or something like that. But it’s still a borderland, you know. [A man] wanted to convince me to … [use heroin] “come on, that’s what you need. I can see it in you. Just a little bit. Come on”, and so on.

In other words, Carolina was forced to pay attention to her surroundings and could not focus on drugs and drug experiences undisturbed. She also had to turn to a string of jobs and purchases and had to take a stand on various offers in order to obtain drugs.

Agnes’ situation is completely different. She does not seem to worry at all, either about finances or acquisition. She describes how she orientates herself towards contexts where the drugs come to her under pleasant circumstances—parties, festivals and clubs—while Carolina reluctantly puts on a smile for “the source”, spending time in “disgusting flats”. It is easy to analyse the entire difference as related to the concept of addiction: a person who is dependent on another’s help may be willing to associate with the person who can help (Lebra 1975, p. 557). Carolina also uses the word addiction to define her use. In the chapter Negotiating Addiction, I discuss this concept in more detail, as a definition of a compulsive approach which means that drugs continue to be used “despite negative consequences” (Heilig 2015, p. 35). But Carolina does not mention any radical changes in her social circle once she started using amphetamines. And Agnes’ concern about her use is precisely about negative consequences linked to overdoses, health and relationships, etc. The concept of addiction thus has some connection to their use in both cases. However, the encounters they describe between drugs and bodies seem to take place in two different worlds. These worlds are built on relationship structures within classed contexts, which results in different perspectives on what is valuable and how exchanges can take place (Skeggs 2004, pp. 10ff.), where drugs are in the vicinity of different collections of objects. Skeggs writes that:

valuing always works in the interests of those who can name it as such. Their perspective on what counts as legitimate puts valuation into effect. In this evaluation process a distinction can be drawn between use-value and exchange value. Making legitimate (making things valid) places the thing (be it person or object) that is being valued in the realm of dominant categorizations. As it is inscribed with value it becomes part of the symbolic economy. The moral evaluation of cultural characteristics is central to the workings and transmission of power. (Skeggs 2004, p. 14)

In line with Skeggs’ argument, the availability of amphetamines to the interviewees is related to Agnes and Carolina being ascribed different value in two different class contexts. Agnes, like Husserl, is valued by herself and those around her from a perspective that expects others to provide certain services in exchange for her presence as symbolic capital.

In Carolina’s social circle, on the other hand, giving away drugs is done with the expectation that sex or other services will be offered in return. Are drugs a gift then, or is it trade? If men around her expect Carolina to perform the “knark whore” when she uses drugs, perhaps what she is being given is not a spiritual part of a soul, but rather a carefully calculated amount of drugs of a certain value, as payment for her labour. Carolina knows the dealers, who make a living from their business, and knows what amphetamines cost. But that knowledge and the social capital that her drug use entails have no value other than its use value, a non-accumulative capital. Agnes, on the other hand, takes drugs both for pleasure and as part of her identity as a valuable woman who does not shy away from risks and likes to party (Skeggs 2004, p. 23), which makes drug use an accumulative capital for her. Ironically, no payment is needed at Agnes’ parties, while Carolina’s efforts to preserve her integrity in the social circles she frequents do cost.

It appears that Mauss’ description of trade as fundamentally voluntary and gift economies as coercive is thus refuted. But Mauss does not argue that these two systems are separate. Gifts, as parts of a total system, intertwine what is bought and sold with what is given and received in rituals that are valid in specific contexts.

Mary Douglas summarises this relationship in her foreword to The Gift: “gift complements market in so far as it operates where the latter is absent” (Douglas 2002, p. xviii). In Carolina’s case, drugs are first and foremost commodities within a market, while Agnes views them as gifts, removed from any market.

What then is the nature of the symbolic reciprocity that Agnes provides, and can it be compared to Husserl’s? In the case of women, gift theories are confusing. Mauss describes gifting as a way to gain and maintain respect, but especially between men. In his studies, women are sometimes seen as commodities to be exchanged, sometimes as economic partners. Skeggs writes that the whole idea of being an owning individual emerged from a privileged perspective, specifically that of men with access to circles of distribution of symbolic values and with an interest in distancing themselves from the “masses” (2004, p. 7). Economic transactions in the form of exchanges of objects, including other people such as women and slaves, she writes, consolidated the differences between men who own themselves and can own objects, and those who cannot, thus laying the foundations for a class society. This is also known to be a heteronormative society, where much energy is spent on explaining and maintaining differences between men and women. Starting from a critique of Freud’s analysis of women as castrated, deficient men, feminist theorist Luce Irigaray writes:

In our social order, women are “products” used and exchanged by men. Their status is that of merchandise, “commodities.” How can such objects of use and transaction claim the right to speak and to participate in exchange in general? (1985, p. 84)

Feminist demands for equality have partially levelled the playing field since Irigaray’s text was written in 1984, and I understand that most women in the twenty-first century in Sweden do not accept the idea of living on men’s terms, but see themselves as subjects who act and negotiate. But the heteronormative order is still based on femininity and masculinity as subordination and superiority, passivity and activity, with femininity thereby becoming a state of deficiency. Can femininity be anything else? (Dahl 2017).

I perceive women’s positions as fluid in relation to the market, between objectification and trading partners, as the example of Carolina shows. As discussed in the chapter “Avoiding the knarkare”, she was not allowed to participate in the sale of drugs. It was instead to sell drugs herself that she worked regularly in order to pay for herself, which thus meant that she was encouraged to accept gifts, with the subsequent expectations of sexual and domestic availability. This could be described as pressure to move from being an active trader/exchanger to rendering herself passive within a gendered exchange system, where addiction was used as a repressive strategy. In other words, excessively coercive expectations of controllability meant that Carolina could not allow a gift/sex trade system to operate, but working in a restaurant and paying for herself also meant proximity to a drug market in which she could not participate on equal terms.

For Agnes, however, the drug market as a gendered place is not present; she remains at a distance (see also Hutton 2006, pp. 49ff. for a description of the significance of gender in relation to drug markets at dance clubs). Agnes instead gets her drugs through a gift system that she enjoys and takes for granted. From Carolina’s point of view, as the world unfolds for her, drugs are bought and “donated” within the same marginalised drug world. From there, she sees no alternatives to an acquisition that involves sexism. Agnes, on the other hand, allows herself to be offered drugs under other conditions, and then, the drugs are as taken for granted as the desk in front of Husserl. She is a woman who is invited to partake when she goes out, but not a woman who owns drugs and takes them home.

Although the givenness of having drugs in front of you without thinking about how they got there can be likened to sitting at your desk and practising philosophy, activities made possible by social conditions, there are nevertheless differences between Agnes and Husserl. Agnes does not own the drugs as Husserl owns his paper and pen, because ownership would imply a different, gendered, market relation. Instead of being a woman who is mainly invited, she would become a woman who owns drugs and can distribute them herself. Agnes emphasises that she is not such a woman. If, on the one hand, femininity provides access to drugs, it also becomes a prerequisite for femininity not to own, but to be invited.

3.1 Women’s Reciprocity

But are offerings only about gender? Not all drug gifts are given by men to women. The general “culture of treating one another” that Richert (2009) mentions is uneven, both in his statistics and in my material, which indicates that sharing between friends or the concept of a culture of treating does not provide the whole picture. Men offer more, and women are more often invited. It is also difficult to invite without owning, which Agnes says she refrains from doing. I therefore wish to examine both the relationship between drugs, femininity and passivity/activity, and bidding culture as a context in relation to gender and class. However, I can only start from the interview responses in the material, which provide a picture of how the women describe their experiences of the gift economy to a researcher. These have been more about the fact that the drugs are donated than how this happens. Angela says:

I don’t really buy amphetamines, people always treat me to them when there’s a party or… An occasion or things…

And Pernilla told me how she obtains drugs:

As for amphetamines and cocaine, people usually treat me. Mm, I mean, yeah, I would say so, or like, we’ll decide that we’ll get our fix together and then, like, all of us get the fix, but it’ll be someone else who actually does the deal, although I do buy cannabis myself.

So Pernilla seems to have a different approach to different illegal substances. Amphetamines and cocaine either cross her path as gifts in certain settings, or someone else will purchase them. Cannabis, on the other hand, is something she also purchases herself. Meanwhile, Dora has yet another relationship to cannabis:

I don’t tend to buy it myself, no. I mainly get it from others, like friends, you know?

So the women I talked to (actively) seek out settings in which drugs are available. In some of these settings, drugs come to them without any financial strings attached. This could be interpreted as meaning that the women orient themselves based on a certain feminine vulnerability (Dahl 2017), bypassing the risky drug market. But does accepting gifts automatically mean they turn themselves into passive objects? When the women I quoted above talked to me about being given drugs, they did not sound concerned; much like Agnes, it seemed as though they considered it a given that they would receive such gifts, or at least it did not seem to be an issue to them. Here is an excerpt from Tone Schunnesson’s hit autobiography from 2016, Tripprapporter:

Don’t buy drugs. Just get them. Learn that you can get anything for free. You never owe anyone anything. Just get and get and get until you can hardly take any more. (p. 152)

Schunnesson’s impatient demands partly resemble Agnes’ attitude and contain no trace of either vulnerability or passivity. In some relationships, drugs are expected as gifts, a circumstance that Schunnesson takes to extremes. Why does she feel entitled to these gifts?

In their study of women flight attendants’ work, sociologists Melissa Tyler and Steve Taylor use Mauss’ concept of an “exchange of aesthetics” to highlight a central and under-theorised aspect of women’s work (1998, see also Petersson McIntyre 2016). They posit that both customers’ and employers’ expectations of women’s bodies to look and behave in a certain way (always being willing to serve, for example, which Tyler and Taylor call “compulsory altruism”) are actually obligatory gifts on the part of women (ibid., p. 169). Aesthetics and altruism, they claim, are made part and parcel of the flight as a commodity, which is why the women’s gifts are regarded as having been paid for, not as something that needs to be repaid. At first sight, Schunnesson’s demands look like a demand for gifts with a refusal to reciprocate. But her attitude could also be interpreted as the other side of the coin of an exchange of aesthetics, a bodily performance of femininity in “the night-time economy”, which requires labour (see, e.g., Nicholls 2019). In that sense, her demand for drugs could be read as a feminist demand to be repaid for the aesthetic gifts she is obligated to give. In the feminist classic Femininity (1984), writer and journalist Susan Brownmiller describes femininity as just that: a gift.

Femininity pleases men because it makes them appear more masculine by contrast; and in truth, conferring an extra portion of unearned gender distinction on men, an unchallenged space in which to breathe freely and feel stronger, wiser, more competent is femininity’s special gift. One could say that masculinity is often an effort to please women, but masculinity pleases by displays of mastery and competence while femininity pleases by suggesting that these concerns, except in small matters are beyond its intent. (p. 4)

What Brownmiller describes as the gift of femininity, making men feel stronger, wiser and more competent by affirming them as such—together with Tyler and Taylor’s description of aesthetics as women’s obligatory gifts—paints a picture of a patriarchal fantasy (Dahl 2017, p. 43), in this case a patriarchal dream relationship. A possible gift economy would be that drugs (or other gifts) are given in the hope of such a relationship. Irigaray writes that attempts to perform femininity expose it (and masculinity) as a masquerade that serves to entrench male systems of representation. The problem, she says, is that when it comes to markets, especially markets for sexual transactions, women’s only choices are either to play on their femininity and thereby lose themselves, or to be left out, without access to the market (1985, p. 84). While there does not appear to be a way for women to allow their femininity to exist in the market, Irigaray does propose a disruptive queer strategy. Instead of asking what women really “are”, and whether she is an object or a subject, Irigaray advocates disruptive exaggerations of femininity:

repeating/interpreting the way in which, within discourse, the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject, they should signify that with respect to this logic a disruptive excess is possible on the feminine side. (ibid., p. 78)

A disruptive excess of the feminine is thus a way of stirring up a dichotomous division of gendered meanings. In the quotation from Schunnesson, above, the reception itself can be interpreted as exaggerated femininity. She accepts and does not stop accepting, but demands more without indicating any (further) reciprocation. The power over the evaluative perspective thus becomes a struggle for the primacy of values, where Schunnesson claims an almost unlimited value that questions the legitimacy of any other judgements. Irigaray’s interpretation opens up the possibility that gift economies, even if they take place within heteronormative contexts, precisely in line with women as recipients and men as active givers, include room for resistance.

But is excess the only way to queer femininity? Is there really no way for a woman to accept a drug gift from a man without either playing on femininity or being marginalised?

Most interviewees describe certain drug-use occasions as intimate, shared contexts, where the focus is on a common experience. Can a phenomenological perspective, based on the situated body with its possibilities for extension, reveal a different, potentially queering, community through drug use? Angela describes a party where the participants produce an intimate, shared spatiality based on shared drug use (cf. Pini 2001, p. 103):

first, the party gets going. People chat, there are all these sensory impressions […] Mm. And then the crowd thins out, some people disappear, and then you go deeper, by being awake, I mean… For a really long time, that is: by not going to bed but taking speed instead… And then, all of a sudden, you’ve got the time to paddle out onto the lake. [Has shown me pictures of people paddling canoes.] And, there’s this intimacy as well. You get a… what’s it called? Like, this island that’s suspended in time. Because everyone has disappeared into the kingdom of sleep by, by then, but you’re left on this island of wakefulness. And… everyone on that island is grateful because we have [carefully articulates] each other and “we chose to be here”, you’re part of a community and you, there’s this kind of shared affection, like “here we are, on this deserted island. Together.” And it gets really… Also because it’s a crime, it becomes this shared secret as well.

The island metaphor takes on a literal meaning here. The island is a physical, and at the same time a perceived, place for intimate community. Those who belong to this group, whose togetherness Angela describes in terms of intimacy, affection and community, linked to the illegality of amphetamines, are separated by wakefulness. The other partygoers are asleep. She describes gratitude “[for having] each other”, and for how those who are close have chosen to be together. The gift system, in terms of intimacy, seems to be manifested through a reciprocation in terms of togetherness. Those who are close in intoxication have given their presence to a mutually intimate situation.

Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty theorises the body as simultaneously both active and passive, subject and object. The body is sentient while becoming known and he describes this as the body’s dual belongingness to the world (1968, pp. 137f.). In this way, the body is vulnerable and impressionable at the same time as it affects and is affected. He further writes that, although people store previous experiences and therefore to some extent do what they usually do, by living/dwelling together, the instituted is simultaneously receptive of elements and significances and may diverge from the past as it initiates the present. There is thus an unpredictable innovativeness in togetherness. Thus, could there be a subtle, or even subversive, possibility of a queering dissolution of social orders in the endeavour to experience temporary intense togetherness through drug use?

3.2 Homeliness

In her book Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, with the instructive subtitle The Move from Home to House (2001), Maria Pini foregrounds a similar description of intimacy and community to the one Angela gives, regarding women’s raving (see also Kavanaugh and Anderson 2008, on solidarity in the rave scene). Several of Pini’s interviewees describe raving, most commonly including the use of amphetamines and ecstasy, as making them feel at home. “Amy” says: “When I discovered rave, I just finally found a place that felt like home – like being in the bosom of my family” (Pini 2001, p. 15).

Pini’s analysis is directed specifically towards the rave scene, and while most interviewees use drugs, some have stopped, or sometimes go to raves without using any, and she theorises this “other world” as being the dancing community, rather than the drug use. In my material, descriptions of feelings of homeliness were common in all kinds of settings and seemed to be related to experiences of altered consciousness together with others, which shaped an intimate space.

Sociologist Deborah Lupton writes that taking risks for pleasure, for example through extreme sports, certain crimes or drug use, can spiritually bind people together.

The pleasures of risk-taking also inhere in the ways in which risk-takers may find a communal spirit with other like-minded souls. To engage in risky activities may bind people together closely in this common pursuit, particularly if they identify each other as being members of the elite group of skilled, tough-minded individuals who can cope successfully with edgework. (1999, p. 157)

Risk-taking, she believes, can forge a team spirit and even, at least for a brief while, dissolve the self:

participants may lose a sense of their autonomous selves, becoming, at least for a brief time, part of a mass of bodies/selves with a common, shared purpose. (Ibid.)

We could view Lupton’s “mass of selves” as a temporary dwelling that simultaneously institutes and is instituted, and which therefore offers queer opportunities to dissolve one’s body into a single shared body, which is also described in spatial terms by Angela, as an “island of wakefulness”. From there, the world unfolds towards common purposes, such as canoeing. But does this (only) have to do with risk-taking? The ravers in Pini’s study do not describe their dancing as primarily a risk-taking activity, but still they foreground intense experiences of becoming part of a mass. “Amy” describes how she can “merge into somewhere strange with people I don’t really know and get so close and be so calm and comfortable within a crowd which is all losing it together”. “Catherine” narrates how she feels “belonging and love” on the dance floor, and that it is important “having the crowd do it together and go mental”. “Jane” describes raving in terms of “doing something more personal with hundreds of other people and getting really close to those hundreds of other people” (2001, pp. 109f.).

Pernilla tells me about a more serene kind of drug use: smoking cannabis with her friends. Like Angela, she uses spatial expressions in combination with intimacy:

personally, I find cannabis, hmm… sweet, precisely because it’s… relaxing and helps me unwind, but also because of the fact that you can just sit and, like, listen to music and chat about stuff and, you know… you have a lot of fun precisely because you’re part of, like, the same kind of bubbles, sort of, which feels really special and intimate.

The people who use drugs together are described by both Angela and Pernilla as sharing an experience of intimacy that is translated into spatiality through an experience of closeness to each other during the intoxication, which is expressed as islands by Angela and bubbles by Pernilla. The drug intoxication and relationship-building make the islands and bubbles into extensions of the body (Ahmed 2006b, p. 58), which experiences a range of positive emotions that together provide connotations of homeliness (ibid., p. 7).

Pernilla uses words like “relaxing”, “unwinding”, “fun”, “special” and “intimate”. Angela says that she and the others who are on amphetamines are “grateful that they have each other”; she too uses the word “intimate”, as well as the phrases “shared secret” and “affection”. This potentially queer, homely state of sharing a body/spatiality seems to be connected to altered states of consciousness, which are connected to drug use. However, these experiences only occur after the drugs have already been obtained. So drugs first have to be brought into these spaces, by people who frequent the drug market or have established some other link to it. And the drug market, where violence, vulnerability and all kinds of risks abound, does not appear homely. Someone in the group must be the person who maintains these links. Sociologist Kristian Mjåland, in his study of prisoners’ “culture of sharing” drugs, explains their willingness to smuggle drugs into the prison and give them away partly by the respect it can earn: “Prisoners accrue respect by importing drugs because it symbolizes ‘nerve’, resistance to the system, ambition and connections to organized drug networks outside prison” (2014, p. 338).

This quote suggests that one could gain respect among those who use drugs by taking the risk of serving as the link between the contrasting drug market and the bubbles and islands where the people who use the drugs feel at home. Intimacy also stands in contrast to gift-giving situations that are neither intimate nor confidential, like the ones Carolina and Schunnesson so vividly depict. Drawing on the concepts of intimacy and politeness, anthropologist Takie Sugiyama Lebra (1975) discusses gift economies in a way that highlights the contradictions between different gift-exchange situations. She criticises the work of anthropologist and gift theorist Marshall Sahlins (2004/1965), rejecting the claim that reciprocity would be based on static relationship structures: instead, she argues, gift economies are ever changing and dynamic. We can achieve intimacy by getting to know someone over a prolonged period of time, or by sharing certain experiences (Lebra 1975, p. 552). But the state of intimacy is never guaranteed.

I interpret the intimacy that the above women are describing as a community in which one’s own body can be temporarily dissolved (at least partially), which means that intimacy can be a queer condition. But, while intimacy may be an ideal drug-induced state, with the spirituality of drug gifts dissolving in the group’s spiritual togetherness, the women I talked to also mentioned a whole host of problems that can make gifts precarious and/or take on unexpected forms. Most of them stressed the importance of being in the right company when taking drugs—a warning that could often be traced back to the shifting nature of gift economies.

3.3 Gifts Causing Trouble

If the intimate context is one of reciprocity, there is also a vulnerability in the maintenance of these structures. When Pernilla discusses her approach to the uncontrolled content of drugs, she describes a readiness to accept whatever she is given:

Emma::

Do you think about it? Purity and…

Pernilla::

Yes. In theory. In practice, when someone goes “d’you want some?”, not so much. [laughs] Unfortunately. I wish I could… No, I’m not that picky when someone’s offering.

The recipient of a gift is not expected to demand quality. But, regardless of what is being offered, the recipient enters into a relationship which in turn can be perceived as an agreement. As Lebra reminds us:

a gift or favor is not only a token of affection or esteem held by the donor for the receiver but is convertible into one of these and other social values to be conveyed in the reverse direction. (1975, p. 555)

A further quote from Tone Schunnesson shows how the legitimacy of perspectives within a gift economy can shift. She repeats the advice to never buy one’s own drugs, but this time continues by describing how the way the environment responds to this requirement can change. She writes:

never buy your own drugs. You can get anything you want for free. Which works for a few years until everyone gets tired, everyone got tired of me. Snapped at me in a taxi: “Why can’t you chip in for once.” (2016, p. 162).

Sahlins defines negative reciprocity as “the attempt to get something for nothing” (1972, p. 195). In the above quote, Schunnesson herself seems to view her demand as a kind of negative reciprocity, because she says drugs should be given to her “for free”. Feminine aesthetics and a willingness to serve are rarely considered gifts, as Tyler and Taylor write; instead, they are a capacity that is expected of women (1998, p. 165), which means they are not acknowledged as accumulative capital. For Mauss, the aesthetic aspects of gifts are important and “extremely numerous” (2002, p. 49), but also inextricably linked to legal, economic and religious exchanges within a total system—an interlinkage that could be analysed through Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital (1986).

But Mauss also highlights something else that indicates a certain forging of community. He argues that there is a common interest in aesthetics that extends beyond morality and self-interest:

everything, food, objects, and services, even “respect”, as the Tlingit say, is a cause of aesthetic emotion, and not only of emotions of a moral order or relating to self-interest. (2002, p. 101)

The intertwining of the ways in which aesthetically pleasing contexts are desired and designed together with the specific conditions of women’s expected endeavours provides a breeding ground for frustration and perceived impoliteness. What can be considered as donated, what should be reciprocated, and how?

Whatever abilities and qualities a person may display in a drug-use context, these need to be recognised by the other participants as reciprocal so that payment or referral to the drug market is not required. Consequently, there is a pride in not having to buy drugs, as shown, for example, by Agnes when she says that she never buys drugs or “has [them] at home”. She can trust that the drugs will come to her when she gets to the right context. But there are also limitations to being invited. Such a position creates distance to the drug market but at the same time limits movement in line with women’s desires (cf. Polanyi 2001/1944). As long as there is moderation and satisfaction with what is offered, practised and experienced, reciprocity follows a pattern that strengthens the community. However, if a desire for more drugs or a desire for a specific drug is involved, the women must move closer to a person with the resources to satisfy that need, either in the form of a gift or in exchange for money.

Boel describes an unpleasant experience from her teenage years, involving a guy in her circle of friends who was giving her drugs instead of selling them to her:

Boel::

I never had to buy anything. I got it, I got it. And it wasn’t as if I asked for it either, I got it.

Emma::

But then, he thought that you…

Boel::

Mm. That I owed him things. I just said no, no, then you can… then I can manage. Then it’s good, like, and he was just like “but please, you can keep that” and I was like, “Ok. But. Then I’ll go now. I’ll go now. And you stay here.” But he, he was a pretty skinny guy and I’d trained in martial arts so maybe he gave in for that reason.

In this quote, Boel shows how the gift implied certain unspoken expectations of reciprocity, which she was not prepared to fulfil. This created a situation that involved the risk of violence, as she suggests by mentioning her physical strength and comparing it to that of the drug dealer. But at the beginning of the quotation, she also suggests a certain pride in being a recipient of gifts, someone who does not have to ask for drugs, which is complemented by her pride in firmly refusing when the donor’s expectations turn into demands.

The interviewees who want to be able to choose the drugs, time and place independently of others, and those who feel they need the drugs regularly, also buy them for themselves. This implies a proximity to the drug market, which is characterised by risk but also by opportunities to show “nerve”.

Boel, who usually buys her drugs herself, has no problem owning drugs, quite the contrary. But this does not make the acquisition unproblematic. She describes her purchases as risky projects and that she uses men to gain an advantage in buying situations. Her tone is convincing when she says:

[If] I bring a big, muscular friend along and introduce him as my brother, I know I’ll get the good stuff, from the top, the top shelf, like. It’s not even hard.

Performative masculinity is described as a commercial advantage here, one that may be used strategically. Boel describes this strategy as an easy part of the drug trade. All she needs to do is make sure she is around the right kind of bodies: strong and/or masculine ones.

As Pernilla shows, however, different kinds of behaviour work in different contexts. She buys cannabis herself and stores it at home, smoking it in specific situations: at home, in the company of close friends. Amphetamines and cocaine, on the other hand, she is usually treated to, at parties or when out clubbing with friends.

Overall, the interview material illustrates that positions and places are fluid, that shared spaces can become inhospitable, gifts can turn into advance payments, intimacy can turn into periphery, and politeness can turn into unwanted sexual advances. Whether women approach the drug market or allow themselves to be treated, obtaining drugs is a gendered, racialised and classed activity, but with potential ability, in a best-case scenario, to lead to a certain world characterised by intimate homeliness.