Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice.

Campbell, Nancy Duff. Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

 

“This book recounts such gendered and sexualized meanings of women and drugs in order to show how public constructions are produced, how they circulate, especially in public policy, and the assumptions that shape them” (Campbell 1-2).

 

“Using Women examines how the cultural meanings of drug use affect the practices of governance, inquiring into their implications for drug policy and their effects on drug-using women’s lives” (Campbell 4).

 

“Policy-making proceeds as a discursive practice, but the texts and practices that emerge from it exercise material effects that shape the experience and interpretation of addiction. Yet policy-makers disclaim their own responsibility by attributing policy failures to human nature, immorality, or bad behavior on the part of the governed. By deflecting blame onto representative figures, policymakers avoid addressing the larger structures, decisions, and policies that exacerbate our multiple drug problems. Holding individuals responsible for addiction reproduces deeply held American notions of personal responsibility, risk, vulnerability, and productive citizenship. But not all individuals have the means or the capacities to discharge the responsibilities of citizenship and social reproduction. The uneven distribution of the means to realize autonomy, reduce vulnerability and violence, and carry out responsibilities is simply disregarded in drug policy. Interrogating this assumption is the basis for proposing social justice as a remedy, and is one of the goals of this book” (emphasis added, Campbell 6-7).

 

“Drug policy is based on policy-makers’ attempts to know the ‘truth’ of addiction. Policy is embedded in the culture that produces it, and is best seen as a cultural practice of governance. The ‘truth’ of addiction limits how stories about it must be told in the policy-making process and in drug studies. For instance, ‘drugs’ are the main vehicle of addiction narratives–they displace other explanations such as economic dislocation or cultural practices that deny agency and efficacy to many people in social contexts where drug use proliferates. Drugs, it seems, banish all other desires and fundamentally transform their users, an attribution of their omnipotence that grants substances the power to erode individual and communal particularity. The myth of pharmacological omnipotence is a culturally specific ‘truth’ inscribed in U.S. drug policy” (emhpasis added, Campbell 7).

 

“By reading cultural assumptions back into policy discourse, I foreground the relationship between the processes of cultural figuration and policy-making rather than denying its existence” (Campbell 7).

 

“Critical policy analysis ‘reads’ public policy for what it can tell us about contemporary political culture. Policy studies is a growing field of feminist scholarship that spans multiple arenas, including antipoverty policy, domestic crime control, immigration, penal policy, reproductive rights, and others. This book joins other feminist policy studies by inquiring into a specific set of obstacles to women’s full political, economic, and social autonomy and participation. Feminists occupy and ideal position from which to link illicit drug policy withe other ‘women’s’ issues such as sexual and reproductive rights and the labor struggle. While feminist approaches vary, they commonly emphasize history, rhetoric and discourse analysis, and cultural studies to a greater extent than conventional policy analysis” (emphasis added, Campbell 7).

 

“Critical policy analysis differs from conventional policy analysis because it examines the structures of political exclusion, social isolation, and economic marginalization. Policy analysis typically misses the cultural assumptions that I call ‘governing mentalities,’ which then exert unacknowledged effects on the policy-making process and policy outcomes” (Campbell 8).

 

“Policy-makers project the sense that they ‘know’ what they are doing–that their decisions are based not on fiction or fantasy but on empirical knowledge. Yet the knowledge on which they rely is inevitably the product of time and place, truth claims that are inscribed and bounded by the governing mentalities that prevail in a particular political rationality. The cultural images that ‘haunt’ knowledge claims and political positions are not generally the stuff of policy analysis, but they are my elusive object. To reach them, I rely on cultural theories of representation that result in a richer analysis more useful to developing a politics of drug policy based on an appeal to social justice” (emphasis added, Campbell 8).

 

“Deciding how to classify the problem and specify its sources limits the possible solutions” (Campbell 13).

 

“My purpose in writing this book was not to disregard the actual harm of women’s drug abuse nor to excuse irresponsible behavior in either gender. Instead, I trace how women’s drug use has been constructed as a gendered, racialized, and sexualized threat to modernity, capitalist production, social reproduction, and democratic citizenship. The figure of the female drug addict is an overdetermined condensation symbol for a wide and shifting array of cultural anxieties that are translated into public policy” (Campbell 14).

 

Chapter 1 – Method: “The remainder of this chapter is an analysis of an influential report… The report represents ‘mainstream’ addiction discourse at the end of the twentieth century, purporting to be a compendium of all ‘scientific’ knowledge, despite its exclusive focus on research that yielded identifiable gender differences achieved through a restricted range of research protocols. The text is replete with examples of how drug discourses reduce political claims in force and scope to an exclusive focus on women’s biological vulnerability” (Campbell 20).

 

Chapter 2 – “By tracing how the figures of drug use have been historically gendered, sexualized, and racialized, we can come to terms with who ‘we’ have become as a public and from there work out who ‘we’ want to be” (Campbell 33).

 

“Through the twin concepts of ‘discursive practice and ‘governing mentalities,’ I will analyze the parade of tropic [trope-ic] figures and the cascades of metaphors that we use to represent drug-using women in political discourse” (Campbell 33).

 

“Policy-makers are in the business of enrolling others in their realities–not only by way of technical reason, realism, and a staunch commitment to the ‘rationality project,’ but through persuasion. Public policy is made through a discursive negotiation between contending ideological positions, rhetorical figures, and material interests. Cultural representations and interpretations of value are as significant as postivist knowledge claims to the policy-making process. Making sense of this significance requires a conceptual framework that refuses to separate the material world from the symbolic, discursive, or narrative technologies that produce the categories and images with which we think. A feminist sociology of knowledge provides that framework, especially when joined with postpositivist policy analysis” (emphasis added, Campbell 34-5).

 

“This chapter centers on how ethics, images, and values enter knowledge production and the policy-making process in the form of the governing mentalities. I offer a conceptual framework for ‘reading’ public policy in order to expand the theoretical repertoire of policy studies and to extend the range of feminist theory” (Campbell 35).

 

“I am not arguing against ‘healthy habits’ but showing how the emphasis on personal responsibility creates an atmosphere of public surveillance and minimizes public responsibility for structural change and redistributive social policy. Postmodern Progressivism devolves to the individual and attributes too much therapeutic value to the state without expanding social provision. ‘Coercive compassion,’ like ‘compassionate conservatism’ is a mode of social regulation that is ultimately more coercive than compassionate” (Campbell 222).

“Writing Ecologies, Rhetorical Epidemics.”

Seas, Kristen. “Writing Ecologies, Rhetorical Epidemics.” Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media: Writing Ecology. Ed. Sidney I. Dobrin. New York: Routledge, 2012. 51–66. Print. 

In this chapter Seas draws on Jenny Edbauer’s concept of “viral economies of rhetorical ecologies” to forward epidemiology as a metaphor for rhetorical circulation and as a measure of its effectiveness. “Thus epidemiology provides a means of explaining nonlinear success in a complex ecology beyond the biological” (Seas 53).
 

“In a sense, then, we could read Gladwell as attempting to provide one account of the viral economy Edbauer mentions by explorin ghow the elements of an ecology–virus, hosts, and environment–converge at just the right time to create a tipping point that will yield exponential change” (Seas 55).
 

“Drawing from theories of social contagions and the diffusion of innovations, I suggest that rhetorical effectiveness can only be assigned retroactively, not as a characteristic of the rhetor and her craft but as an emergent property of the conditions made possible by the interaction of virus, environments, and hosts. Indeed, I conclude that any rhetor must attend to and cultivate these conditions, rather than seeking to isolate specific strategies  for controlling them through craft” (Seas 56).

 

Hence the idea of cultivation becomes key to rhetorical success–cultivating the context, priming audiences in hopes of creating an environment in which persuasion can take place.

 

“For ideas to spread, for instance, there must be ‘a trade-off between cohesion within groups and connectivity across them’ (Watts 231). Connectors master what in network theory is called a weak tie, a connection between people who don’t ‘know each other that well or have that much in common’ (Watts 49). These weak ties then connect clusters of strong ties–families, groups of friends, colleagues, etc.–to other clusters that they would otherwise not have access to given the tendency toward insular social grouping” (Seas 61). Here Seas offers an explanation for the way that political and ideological ideas spread between otherwise opposed religious groups (Catholic, Protestant, etc.).

 

“Following these insights then, rhetoric–as an art of persuasion–would more likely participate in social contagion by altering an individual’s threshold to make the person more susceptible to influence. For instance, we might say that an effective rhetoric lowers a person’s threshold, making her more susceptible to influence for that particular contagion” (Seas 62).

 

“According to Watts, the ‘trick is to focus not on the stimulus itself but on the structures of the network that the stimulus hits’ (249), for those structures and conditions determine whether an idea can survive and even thrive” (Seas 63).

 

“Therefore, we must not focus so much on altering specific individuals as on cultivating the whole system somehow. Besides lowering individuals’ thresholds for social decision-making, maybe we can lessen the amount of people they’re connected too [sic], alter the environmental influences that reinforce their subjectivity, or, as always, craft more compelling contagions. Regardless, we need to keep in mind that the influence we seek to exercise when practicing rhetoric is not entirely within our artistic control” (Seas 64). Is this known in logical fallacy circles as poisoning the well? Convincing audiences that only one channel (Fox News) can be trusted, limiting their range of information access?

 

“What we want to cultivate, then, is a rhetorical ecology that continually moves toward tipping points, toward opportunities for change. … Because we never know when what we say will take place at just the right time under just the right conditions to tip the world” (Seas 64).

 

Noting how rhetorical success is inherently contextual, challenging the idea of rhetorical autonomy and intentionality as keys to rhetorical success, Seas argues that we can only determine rhetorical effectiveness in looking backward on past events.

“Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.”

Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” College English 70.5 (2008): 471–489. JSTOR. Web. 28 Feb. 2013.

Offers field as metaphor for thinking about digital circulation and the inherent, often invisible, ambient elements (embedded histories, relationships).

Abstract: In this essay, the author examines the digital circulations of representations of one Afghan women’s rights organization–the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)–to demonstrate the importance of a global and digital field for feminist rhetorical analysis. Specifically, this analysis traces how women’s self-representations are transformed through their circulation within global fields of rhetorical action in ways that often “fix” these women within neoliberal frameworks of “democracy” and “women’s rights,” thus erasing the multiple ways in which women across the globe use Internet technology to create and claim identities, agency, and political activism outside of the circulation of one-third world rhetorics of power. This essay emphasizes the importance of understanding the cybercirculation and mediation of representations of RAWA through Internet technologies–a factor that has often been ignored by feminists from the West as they strive to deploy RAWA as an agent for their own ends. (Contains 11 notes.)

“The focus here on the circulation of digital texts as integral to the representations of RAWA and Afghan women reveals the complexity of the intersections among global and digital production and consumption of meaning, as well as the processes through which the global circulation of digital representations becomes rhetorical and, ultimately, political actions. Feminist rhetorical studies must extend their analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations, because this digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority. We need to pay attention to the processes through which cyberspace circulations construct the “Other Woman” and reinforce the rationality of U.S. concepts and practices of “de-mocracy” and “women’s rights.”2  Through neoliberal rhetorics of modernity and progress, U.S. neoliberal feminism not only distances itself—both temporally and spatially—from the Other Woman, but also reinforces a global hierarchical system in which one-third world U.S. feminists act as “saviors” of two-thirds world women imprisoned within oppressive, violent, traditional/fundamentalist patriarchal struc-tures of underdeveloped nations.3 In doing so, we shift our own vulnerability to and culpability in the violence of U.S. patriarchal and capitalist practices onto the backs of two-thirds world women, and claim agency and self-representation for ourselves while denying this same capacity to them” (emphasis added, Queen 472).

How does whiteness factor into this claim of agency and self-representation for ourselves and what does that look like for primarily white patriarchal enclaves in the U.S.?

“The sociotechnical production of cyberspace—the knowledge-power processes that inscribe and materialize the world in some forms rather than others (Haraway 7)—is the very embodiment of globalization and, thus, shot through with material and structural relations of force” (Queen 472).

Globalization is necessarily material.|

“I am not suggesting that spatial or network metaphors are no longer useful; rather, I am proposing that the term fields provides a more accurate conceptual basis for understanding digital circulation because it helps us “visualize the effects of forces,” e.g., electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields (Schombert). In physics, fields are filled with interacting forces that, although they are imperceptible, have very real effects on objects (emphasis added, Queen 474).

Thinking of the source of rhetorics as a field attends to the material implications of ambient influences.

“The methodology that I have developed for analyzing these processes of digital circulation is what I call rhetorical genealogy: a process of examining digital texts not as artifacts of rhetorical productions, but, rather, as continually evolving rhetorical actions that are materially bound, actions whose transformation can be traced through the links embedded within multiple fields of circulation. Rhetorical genealogy is rhetorical analysis that examines multiple processes of structuring representations, rather than seeks to identify the original intentions or final effects of structured (and thus already stabilized) representations. A genealogical investigation works to uncover not only the meaning of meaning, but the structuring of meaning, that is, the cultural practices and rhetorics through which particular representations and interpretations gain validity and power” (emphasis added, Queen 475-6).

Publics and Counterpublics.

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone, 2002. Print.

“In the ideals of ethnic identity, or sisterhood, or gay pride, to take the most common examples, an assertive and affirmative concept of identity seems to achieve a correspondence between public existence and private self. Identity politics in this sense seems to many people a way of overcoming both the denial of public existence that is so often the form of domination and the incoherence of the experience that domination creates, an experience that often feels more like invisibility than like the kind of privacy you value” (Warner 26).

Perhaps Warner’s explanation of the relationship between identity politics and a cultural context with a clear public/private divide is useful in understanding conservatives’ resistance to identity politics. It disturbs their dearly-loved public/private construct. (Chapter Two.)

“Any organized attempt to transform gender or sexuality is a public questioning of private life, and thus the critical study of gender and sexuality entails a problem of public and private in its own practice” (Warner 31).

According to Warner, do fundamentalist rhetorics try to be counterpublics even as they promote very traditional views?

“In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience.”

Rickert, Thomas. “In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience.” JAC 24.4 (2004): 901–927. Print.

“The writer writing in network culture is not alone, being always linked to or haunted by others, some familiar, some strange” (Rickert 901-2).

“With these questions, I move us to a consideration of the complex, coadaptive relations between a subject, such as a writer, and the larger environment. For a variety ofreasons, many of which will become clear below, I offer the metaphor of “ambience” to aid us in thinking through the full implications of a network logic that would be incarnational” (Rickert 903).

“Language and environment are perhaps not so much linked as they are enmeshed, and the scope of this claim would have to include us, too, if we accept fully the implications of an incarnational logic” (Rickert 904).

“Like the metaphor ofthe network, ambience connotes distribution, co-adaptation,
and emergence, but it adds an emphasis to the constitutive role of the overall, blended environment that the network does not. The ambient is immersive in that it is post-conscious and auratic, being keyed to various levels ofattention that are nevertheless always in play at a given moment; and it is blended in that no element can be singled out as decisive, for they are all integral to its singular emergence” (Rickert 904).

“Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry’s Response to Bioterrorism.”

Scott, J. Blake. “Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry’s Response to Bioterrorism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92.2 (2006): 115–143. Web. 2 July 2012.

Scott complicates and extends existing conceptions of the rhetorical principle of kairos to show how “rhetors can still attempt to strategically construct, deploy, predict, and avoid global risks, but the effects of such actions will often be incalculable, uncontrollable, and precarious” (138).  Ultimately he calls his readers to “explor[e] rhetoric’s interdependent and relative roles in the construction, functions, and effects of risk across global socio-political contexts” (138).

Although I am not so much interested in Scott’s concern with risk management, I am interested in his conception of how kairos is a helpful tool in understanding how “rhetorical trajectories [are] shaped, in part, by globalization’s actors, power dynamics, and flows…” as opposed to the rhetorical agency of the speaker (138).

My hunch is that somehow this is important for my research, but I’m not exactly sure how yet because I am more interested in how kairos is visible in priming audiences with what seems like bizarre claims in order to make them more amenable to related policy initiatives that come along later.  At first agency seems inherent in such a move, but what if we flip that around and see it instead as an expression of sovereignty given the tight control of media by a few corporations in the dissemination of politicans’ (policy-makers’) rhetoric? What good is agency in a digital age if it is limited to those with an audience? Doesn’t it quickly become something more akin to sovereignty, the power to exert control over others rather than the individual’s power to act?

“Examining the Cases.”

Almond, Gabriel A., Emmanuel Sivan, and R. Scott Appleby. “Examining the Cases.” Fundamentalisms Comprehended. Ed. Martin E. Marty & R. Scott Appleby. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print.

“Two aspects of this new world-conquering fundamentalism [Moral Majority, Religious Right, Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, etc.] must be noted. (1) For the activists of the Christian Right, the language of restoration is favored over the language of revolution. The political structures and founding principles of the United States need not be overturned,but merely returned to their philosophical-theological basis in ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition.’ This may seem like a revolution, the Christian activists say, given how far we Americans have strayed from our divine origins. (2) The theological precision of separatist, Bible-believing fundamentalism in its early stages of origins and growth has given way, ironically, to an internal theological pluralism tied together by political coalitions (the Christian Right) rather than by historic theological and religious distinctions (fundamentalist, Pentecostal, etc.). Robertson, the leader of the Christian Caolition, is a Pentacostal rather than a fundamentalist; he affiliates not only with fundamentalists like Falwell, but also with the ‘Reconstructionist’ Christians led by Gary North and the ideologue Rousas John Rushdoony, who preaches the concept of ‘theonomy’ and would base U.S. law on the Mosaic codes of the Hebrew Bible.

“In the world-conquering phase of fundamentalism, ideology and political considerations tend to muffle potentially divisive religious and theological elements” (Almond, Sivan, and Appleby 452).