Feminized need and racialized danger: Punitive therapeutics and historical addict tropes in a Midwestern drug court

Abstract

Drug courts are widely praised as a therapeutic alternative to mass incarceration. Using ethnographic discourse analysis, our intersectional comparison of a Midwestern court demonstrates how gender and race create differentiated and unequal rehabilitative projects. Striking differences in treatment, sanctions, and requirements demonstrate the lasting power of long-standing historical addiction tropes. Our primarily white and African-American site re-inscribed the historical polarization between “white slaves” and “drug zombies”, between the (traumatized female) “involuntary addict” and the dangerous agency of the (racialized) male “criminal addict”. The explicit gender differentiation between therapy for women and work for men was thus cross-cut by race, with talk therapy for white women and neuro-scientific medicalization for white men set against deep racio-cultural reform for African-Americans. While Black women were encouraged to take on intensive mothering, Black men were subjected to the highest surveillance and suspicion, their struggles in the labor and housing markets misrecognized as cultural deficiency.