Treatment Identities

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the everyday operations of power and agency in MMT. Like Chapters 1 and 2, it is concerned with sanctioned, ‘official’ material-discursive practices, such as clinical guidelines. Like Chapter 3, it is also concerned with the details of clients’ day-to-day experiences of treatment, and the ways in which the mechanisms of treatment materialise subjects. Here, our focus is on the identities and roles of the human actors who enact the worlds of MMT. Its purpose is to describe the identities that are produced, altered and contested, and discuss the implications that these treatment identities may have for social agency and biological citizenship (Rose and Novas, 2005). Building on Chapter 1 in its use of the agential realism of Karen Barad, it is also indebted to sociological and philosophical approaches to identity that are not concerned with materiality in the same way.