Tensions an Possibilities for a Narcofeminist Sociology by Fay Dennis, Kiran Pienaar and Marsha Rosengarten

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Tensions and possibilities for a narcofeminist sociology

The Sociological Review Monographs 2023, Vol. 71(4) 945­ –954

© The Author(s) 2023

Fay Dennis, Kiran Pienaar, Marsha Rosengarten

Abstract

In this piece we reflect on the tensions and complexities of drug use that narcofeminism has

prompted us to grapple with in producing this collection. Narcofeminist approaches challenge us

to move beyond simplistic, moralistic frameworks that pathologise and stigmatise those who use

drugs, and instead seek more nuanced understandings of the social, cultural and political forces

through which drug use materialises. By foregrounding the experiences of women and other

marginalised groups who use drugs, narcofeminism highlights the ways in which drug consumption

is always already gendered, racialised and classed. Narcofeminist approaches insist on a double

vision attuned to violence and suffering as well as the possibility of alternative realities. This dual

vision recognises a historical and contemporary context of dehumanisation while embracing and

reclaiming new forms of humanness that challenge the figure of Enlightenment Man; it insists on

the complexities of drug use that are all too often elided by singular stories of pain/pleasure and

benefit/harm. Ultimately, narcofeminism challenges us to rethink our assumptions about drug

use, and to recognise the voices and subjectivities of people who consume drugs, even in the

face of intense hostility and oppression. By doing so, narcofeminist approaches have the potential

to enrich and expand the sociological study of drug use and to contribute to drug policies that

prioritise care and community over punishment and control.

Keywords

drug user activism, feminisms, marginalised groups, narcofeminism, sociology of drugs

We begin this afterword by revisiting the closing remark of one of the narcofeminist

activists1 we interviewed. When asked how we can support the narcofeminist movement

and vision, she replied simply: ‘I think you can help us by talking positively about us, by

showing the human face of an unpopular problem.’ We remain struck by the apparent

modesty of this request. It reminds us of the struggles that confront women and other

marginalised groups who use drugs, where humanising them is a positive move to chal-

lenge the pernicious stigma associated with illicit drug use. Although in some circles the

notion of the human is challenged (Butler, 2021), in the context of the narcofeminist

movement it is used expressly to contest the rendering of those who use drugs as less

than human. It is an explicit attempt to recuperate those who are made minoritarian in a

schema where moral judgements play to modes of exploitation and oppression. Here the

narcofeminists’ appeal to ‘show the human face’ of drug use functions to drive home the

stark contextual and structural factors associated with prohibitionist drug policy that

shape experiences of drug use and drug-related oppression in different geographical con-

texts. It also draws attention to the privileged environments in which many sociological

accounts of drug use are situated, that is, in Western liberal democracies such as Australia,

the UK and most Western European countries where drug policy is more oriented to

public health rather than punitive measures such as pre-trial detention, mandatory mini-

mum prison sentences and, in some cases, the death penalty. But this request or invitation

is also doing more. It alludes to the historical campaigns and political economies of

dehumanisation that disproportionately affect feminised and racialised people who use

drugs. It invites a conversation on minoritised drug practices informed by the recognition

of our common connectedness but that is also sensitive to difference and diversity of

experience. And it stresses the importance of ‘talking positively’. Thought about in this

way, this deceptively simple, modest request helps draw together the shared interests of

the authors in this collection and alludes to the unique contribution of narcofeminisms2

for sociology.

Narcofeminisms prompt us to grapple with the complexities of drug use, as brought

into focus by women and other gender minorities who consume drugs. It pushes us to find

new and better concepts for articulating the histories, political economies and tensions in

people’s drug consumption where stories of pain and suffering or celebratory accounts of

pleasure are revealed as equally reductive, one-dimensional depictions that flatten diverse

experiences of living with drugs. Instead, narcofeminist approaches engage the complexi-

ties of drug consumption where drug-related risks and harms do not occlude their rewards

and benefits, and patterns of violence and oppression do not foreclose practices of care

and community-building. The women and other minoritised peoples in this volume offer

us a way of holding onto these tensions, refusing the tendency to draw neat distinctions

that circumscribe, and ultimately impoverish our understandings of people’s diverse expe-

riences with drugs. Moreover, they show us how drugs themselves are involved in ethico-

political practices and help to engender new ways of thinking, feeling and living. As such,

we suggest that narcofeminist approaches are ontopolitically oriented (Fraser, 2020) in

that they advocate for and help to produce more expansive realities, ones that may open

our thinking on questions of justice, care and well-being.

The monograph hinges on the idea that narcofeminisms – the everyday practices of

narcofeminism – can take the sociology of drugs to these places of discomfort and ten-

sion where it has often struggled to go. Where the conventional sociology of drugsDennis et al. 947

remains focused on the rational subject as highlighted in the introductory article (Dennis

et al., this volume), narcofeminisms reach towards a more collective and hopeful vision

for a feminist future with drugs. This also differs from moves towards the ‘material’ and

‘more-than-human’ in the sociology of drugs and critical drug studies. As Kane Race

points out in his contribution to this volume, in our eagerness to identify the limits of the

rational drug-using subject (the neoliberal subject of harm reduction) (Moore, 2008), we

may have gone too far in the opposite direction. He argues that while posthumanist and

new materialist scholarship of this kind

provides indispensable critical, conceptual and methodological tools for tracing the

materialisation of drug events [it] is less forthcoming about the cultural registers, the genres of

experience, the gestural forms through which these relational dynamics are grasped by

(historically situated) human subjects.

This is particularly stark ‘where the precedential power of the concept of sovereignty

looms poignantly, both in performative acts of state violence and decolonial (Indigenous)

critiques of them’ (Race, this volume). Drawing on narcofeminist and decolonial femi-

nist thinking, Race explores how drug policing, specifically strip-searching, functions as

a dehumanising form of sovereign violence to which marginalised groups are subjected.

His analysis exposes the violent logics of police power, arguing that they ‘produce cer-

tain populations [notably indigenous Australians, racial minorities and LGBTIQ+ peo-

ple] as abject in order to shore up settler-colonial determinations of (individual and

national) sovereignty’.

Narcofeminist thinking holds these tensions and struggles without trying to reconcile

or erase them. These are the ‘toggles’ and ‘new collectivities’ that Campbell and Race

respectively speak to in their essays.

[The] toggles between violences that have already happened and the need to undo them

nonetheless, between the condition of being already altered and the struggle to become

otherwise in the aftermath. (Murphy, 2017, p. 5 cited in Campbell, this volume)

[The struggle] to assemble new collectivities that foreground the relationality of bodies in the

process of protesting unjust forms of violation. (Race, this volume)

This is narcofeminism’s unique contribution to a sociology that has difficulty holding in

focus these seemingly contradictory forces. Narcofeminist approaches insist on this dou-

ble vision of violence, suffering, and the possibility of alternative realities. This dual

vision recognises a historical and contemporary context of dehumanisation while embrac-

ing and reclaiming new forms of humanness that challenge the figure of Enlightenment

Man; it insists on the complexities of drug use that are all too often elided by singular

stories of pain or pleasure; and, crucially, it pushes the sociology of drugs into a new reg-

ister where researchers and participants alike are engaged in acts of worldbuilding.

Dehumanisation and new forms of humanness

A key contribution of narcofeminist thinking is its twin recognition of the dehumanising

logic at the heart of dominant discourses on illicit drug use and the possibilities for

embracing new forms of humanness that challenge the figure of Enlightenment Man.

Here we are once again reminded of the narcofeminists’ request to show the ‘human face

of an unpopular problem’ – a problem that is firmly situated in these forms of exclusion.

Elsewhere in our interview with narcofeminist representatives, they described how they

are expected to be meek, passive mothers: ‘[we] are supposed to be looking down at the

floor and at the ground’ (Bessonova et al., this volume). This is an expectation that car-

ries over to their campaigning. When they speak about drug consumption in a way that

is not strictly within the neoliberal medical frame of reducing harm, they are castigated

for this breach and dismissed as feminised others in terms that evoke the figure of the

‘hysterical woman’: ‘Oh, these women, what are they doing, these crazy women!? I

don’t understand, I don’t support it.’ As narcofeminist activists, they are doubly stigma-

tised: outlawed as people who use drugs and seen as transgressing normative societal

expectations of them as women. In terms of the former, because illicit drugs are seen as

threatening the sovereign agency of the neoliberal body and its controlled pleasures

(Moore, 2008), people who use drugs pose a threat to the neoliberal values of autonomy

and freedom, evoking a deep-seated fear of dependence and the loss of identity and

agency. Moreover, women and gender minorities who use drugs are positioned as vectors

of moral contamination who have transgressed the norms of femininity, their bodies seen

as hypersexualised, ‘dangerous, diseased and polluted’ by their enslavement to drugs

(Maher, 1997, p. 194, see also Campbell, 2000).

For women and other minoritarian peoples who use drugs, exclusion is therefore

always working on multiple axes. This monograph speaks to these multiplicities and the

tensions they embody as narcofeminism confronts the limits of the sovereign subject. As

Chang (this volume) puts it, ‘we are both not enough and too much. . . . We are too loud

and out-of-control, too rebellious, too uncouth, too irrational, and disordered.’ Living

and surviving in the interstitial spaces of dominant regimes of power and control, nar-

cofeminists may be understood as adding to more plural conceptions of what it means to

be a woman or minoritised person who consumes drugs: not a disordered, irrational fig-

ure, but one drawn from the vast creativity of experience. This may involve joy, imagina-

tive play, solidarity and connection with other women and minoritised peoples as well as

pain, suffering and subjection to policing and drug law enforcement.

Furthermore, narcofeminisms extend and reclaim new versions of what we might

consider constitutes human experience or humanness. Here we reflect on the narcofemi-

nist activists’ reference to the Metzineres in Barcelona: ‘an amazing grassroots move-

ment of women, non-binary, queer and all kinds of women who exist in this world’

(Bessonova et al., this volume). The Metzineres website explains how they are reclaim-

ing the term Metzineres, the Catalan word for ‘witch’, a term that has historically been

used to pathologise and subjugate women, and particularly their experimentation with

substances in pursuit of alternative remedies and experiences (Metzineres.org). The

Metzineres reclaim this term in a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of women

and gender diverse people who use drugs in the face of adversity. Such acts are seen

throughout the collection, but perhaps most overtly, in its witch-like experimentation, is

Dymock’s examination of women’s use of psychedelic drugs for extending the limits of

consciousness to imagine new possibilities for being, notably as a form of resistance to

patriarchal narratives of ‘self-improvement’ and ‘wellness’. Similarly, for Keane, the

‘drinking at home women’ engages in ‘experimental forms of enhancement within the

busy days and crowded rooms of domestic life’.

Judy Chang (this volume) argues that while we must recognise experiences of societal

as well as individual harm, these do not occlude the diverse, and often life-affirming

reasons that women and gender minorities consume drugs. Eliding these generative

aspects of drug consumption has a deadening, flattening effect: it reduces people who

use drugs to disordered figures, who are seen as driven only by compulsive desires.

Similar claims are made in Dennis and Pienaar’s article for understanding women’s drug

consumption practices as minoritarian acts of resistance – a resistance that is very much

embedded in ‘the paradox of cramped creation, the entanglement of escape and confine-

ment, flight and captivity’ (Hartman, 2019, p. 227, cited in Dennis & Pienaar, this vol-

ume). Crucially for narcofeminisms, trauma and violence are not the sole defining

experiences of women and other marginalised groups who use drugs; neither do they

exclude the possibility of generating something new and productive. Indeed the legacies

of gender-related trauma, violence and suffering necessitate acts of resistance oriented to

forging more just, compassionate worlds. With this in mind, we turn next to the limits of

binary thinking for understanding gendered drug consumption, before exploring the

alternative possibilities that narcofeminism enacts for living with drugs.

Beyond the pleasure/pain binary: Storying new worlds

[E]ven when communities are broken and conquered, they are so much more than that – so

much more that this incomplete story is an act of aggression. (Tuck, 2009, p. 416)

As Indigenous feminist scholar Eve Tuck reminds us in relation to minoritised commu-

nities, stories of pain and damage are not only insufficient in the face of the myriad

complexity of their experiences, they do ontological violence in presenting an incom-

plete, reductive story. The contributors to this collection provide insight into quotidian

acts of resistance – as ways of coping, creating, experimenting, surviving and thriving.

But as we have also observed, where sociologies of drug use have centred pleasure to

counter pathologising tendencies (with our own work being no exception!), this has also

proved inadequate to the task of engaging the complexity, tensions and contradictions

that characterise lived experiences of drug use. For critical drug scholar Peta Malins,

pleasure is on the side of the sovereign subject – the figure of the rational human that

relies on the image of Enlightenment Man – who, as we have seen, is deeply implicated

in the oppression of people who use drugs, especially women and gender minorities. As

Malins explains, ‘Pleasure brings back an . . . autonomous and agentic subject’: ‘a

stratified emotionally aware self who is able to extract something familiar – a recognis-

able emotion or identity – from desire’ (Malins, 2017, p. 128). Malins draws on Deleuze

and Guattari’s reconceptualisation of desire, rather than pleasure, arguing that it attends

to the possibilities of what bodies can do and to the complex dynamics of drugs and

bodies. Importantly, for our purposes, she suggests that desire offers a more useful heu-

ristic for ‘accounting for the diversity of drug experiences, practices and motivations’

(Malins, 2017, p. 127). Similarly, it is a desire-led approach that Tuck (2009) proposes

as the ‘antidote’ to ‘damage-centred research’. We therefore return to desire to articulate

the complexities of minoritised drug use in terms that exceed common narratives of

pain or pleasure.

The explanatory logics of damage, hardship and suffering continue to prevail when it

comes to understanding drug use. We see these threads across the monograph in terms of

the repressive discourses that contributors are writing against – risk, harm, addiction,

misery, stigma, etc. While not denying these realities, we recognise that centring them

risks occluding acts of survival, resurgence and creativity erupting in the seams. While

some harm reduction advocates argue that these stories of pain and suffering enable

change – evidencing the harms of drug consumption in order to justify funding harm

reduction measures – for narcofeminism, this will not do, and can generate counterpro-

ductive effects. In this vein but widening the lens beyond drug consumption, Eve Tuck

warns against the detrimental effects of such a ‘theory of change’ for marginalised com-

munities and the lasting damage of these narratives.

[R]esearch that intends to document peoples’ pain and brokenness to hold those in power

accountable for their oppression . . . operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to

leverage reparations or resources for marginalised communities yet simultaneously reinforces

and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless.

(2009, p. 409)

The most concrete example of this in the collection is Marie Jauffret-Roustide’s study of a

biomedicalised safer injecting programme where people are supported to inject drugs but in

a way that makes injecting solely about reducing harm – blood-borne viruses, infections,

overdose – and ‘alleviating the pain of withdrawal symptoms’. Where this kind of injecting

support originates from peer-to-peer care, activism and grassroots organising, it is through

its institutionalisation that the life-affirming reasons people inject opioids are ignored, which

in turn reduces them to abject figures, victims of disordered compulsion. These losses have

been tolerated for their perceived political gains (Fraser & Moore, 2006; Keane, 2003), i.e.

they transform the ‘irrational’, ‘immoral’ drug user into a ‘rational’, ‘health-seeking’ figure

deserving of state-funded treatment and healthcare. However, we reflect here on the conse-

quences of these stories and caution against their enduring, deleterious effects, however

unintended. Campbell (this volume) asks: ‘Can we undo the damage-centered work

inscribed in the language of “drug-related harms” in order to bring into being harm reduc-

tion techniques that don’t fall into protectionist stances or otherwise erode agency?’

In Dennis and Pienaar’s article, we see how drug treatment relies on a ruin-redemption

narrative of drug use in which the affected person presents themselves as a disordered

subject in need of treatment – accounting for oneself as ‘a piece of shit’ as their case study

Kim phrases it. For Kim the potential pay-off – ceasing or reducing her drug consumption

– is not worth it. She refuses these narratives, and the limited options they afford, and

leaves treatment. Narcofeminism rejects these stories of tragedy and pathology that peo-

ple, particularly women and gender diverse people, are expected to narrate in order to

access support, and warns against the harms that ricochet out, eroding self-esteem and

community-building. These threats to the self and community are evident in the hierarchi-

sation of drug users, ‘respectability politics’ (Higginbotham 1993), the authorisation of

certain voices (who can tell these stories of pathology), and other forms of essentialism

(Chang, this volume, see also Narcofeminism storyshare project, INPUD, 2022).

But much like these narratives of harm, a singular focus on pleasure as a counter-

strategy is also insufficient in the face of the hardships and complexities of people’s

lives. In our interview with the narcofeminist activists, Alla Bessonova explains why the

experience of drug-related pleasure is often not possible in her region, accounting for

‘repressive laws’, ‘very low . . . quality drugs’, ‘police and law enforcement’: ‘You can’t

relax and get high from a substance because you’re always stressed from this whole situ-

ation and when a person, a woman uses drugs, I don’t know, it’s not pleasure.’ When drug

use is so viscerally embedded in these violent social orders, pleasure is a poor descriptor

and tool for political action. It is vulnerable to being weaponised against people who use

drugs in the same ways as narratives of harm. Like the activists who inspire them, the

versions of narcofeminism enacted in this collection reject a simplistic rendering of

pleasure, favouring more capacious terms in line with the Deleuzo-Guattarian (1987,

1997) concept of desire favoured by Tuck (2009) and Malins (2017). We note words such

as creativity, comfort, play, fun and experimentation to describe the life-affirming aspects

of narcofeminisms that fit less comfortably into the felicitous calculus of pleasure (see

Campbell, this volume). Where pleasure is discussed, it is always part of a multitude of

other, often contradictory experiences. We might think of this as the ‘human face’ of

narcofeminisms, warts and all. It does not exclude repressive forces; in fact, it may even

make such powers and constraints more visible.

Keane, in her essay, suggests that the ‘prioritisation of women’s pleasure can sensitise

us to the restrictive gender norms that are built into this figure [of the drinking at home

woman]’. Even in Florêncio’s and Azbel’s ethnographies that are most closely connected

to pleasure, this is not an individualised pursuit of hedonism or ‘finding oneself’. Viewed

through a narcofeminist lens, experiences of clubbing and ‘chemsex’ invite the question:

what new constellations of sexuality and intimacy might these experiences yield?

Thinking with the insights of narcofeminism, clubbing and chemsex practices are con-

ceived as ‘queer laboratories’ (Florêncio) or ‘intimate infrastructures’ (Azbel), where

drugs, bodies and technologies provoke new possibilities for living that challenge patri-

archal, heteronormative accounts of connection, sexuality, gender, family and kinship.

For Florêncio: ‘Drugs allowed us to move past whatever boundaries we had thought

delimited ourselves and our bodies’ capacities for relation, pleasure and affect – for joy.’

But drawing on Saldanha’s ethnography of India’s trance parties, Florêncio is not naïve

to the privilege of his own body in these spaces (see also Azbel’s account of gay spaces)

and warns of the ways clubs are vulnerable to ‘molar’ forms of organising. This caution-

ary note chimes with Malins’ assertion that:

By thinking through drug assemblages in terms of the ways that desire circulates, we might

better understand the kinds of power relations and passions that not only drive or emerge from

them, but also those that operate to stratify, categorise, police and control them. (2017, p. 129)

Taking up the themes of desire and the generative possibilities of drugs, Azbel offers an

insider’s view of the ‘femme-forward’ chemsex parties that surfaced during the 2020

COVID-19 lockdowns in Berlin. In response to lockdown measures that failed to account

for queer modes of kinship outside the heteronormative nuclear family model, groups of

gender diverse people experimented with drugs, sex and pleasure in new ways, yielding

new subjectivities and experiences. In these gatherings, narcofeminism confronts the

organisation of bodies into sexed, territorialised categories. In the home, a space once

demarcated by female domesticity and oppression, new modes of ‘femme-forward’

expression emerge:

Neither private nor public, coupled nor casual, club nor home (look no further than the name of

the gatherings: Klubheim), gay nor straight, [female nor male], these queer feminist gatherings

produced effects that cut across a wide range of binaries.

Compared to club spaces, Azbel observes different, more egalitarian forms of care and

connection. A discourse of pleasure does not do justice to the complexities, tensions and

possibilities of these narcofeminist spaces and events; an observation that resonates with

Malins’ call for centring ‘desire’ over ‘pleasure’:

Flows of desire can indeed manifest as pleasure, but they can also be expressed and experienced

in many other ways: ways that may be more liberating, transformative, or revolutionary,

challenging who we are and how we engage with the world. (Malins, 2017, p. 128)

The possibilities afforded by the concept of desire are elaborated in Campbell’s essay

where she proposes an ‘alterbiopolitics’ that ‘shifts the relentless focus on harm to one

in which desire and fun can surface meaningfully’. Next we consider these alternative

narcofeminist ontologies for understanding drug use beyond the harm/pleasure binary

and reflect on how they contribute to sociologies of the ‘more-than-human’ more

broadly.

A narcofeminist alterlife: Embodied speculating for a

better world

We use our stories with the intention to create new feminist realities and alternatives, so that our

‘subjectivities serve as sites of resistance’ (Du Rose, 2015, p. 137). Since we understand

ourselves to be ‘made up people’ in mainstream discourses and narratives, we can therefore

also remake ourselves on our own terms (Hacking, 1995). (Chang, this volume)

Alterlife is already recomposed, pained, and damaged, but potentiality nonetheless. Alterlife, as

potential, challenges us to learn with a thick archive and dense present of projects of resistance

and resurgence. It is also an invitation to consider what infrastructures and concepts have to be

dismantled to make room for another way of being and knowing to emerge. It is an invitation

to begin inhabiting alter-embodiments now. (Murphy, 2017, p. 10)

In what follows, we reflect on Nancy Campbell’s (this volume) invitation to think of the

tensions, ambivalences and alternative forms of living with drugs as a narcofeminist

alterlife. Where she applies this line of enquiry to the empirical case study of harm reduc-

tion art, we take the liberty of extending this thinking to the monograph as a whole and

especially narcofeminisms’ commitment to bringing forth a better world.

With its twin vision of disrupting the oppressive legacies of drug control and ‘actively

speculating ourselves and our bodies toward a more expansive future’ (Florêncio, this

volume), narcofeminism keeps sight of the inequalities and overlapping forms of

oppression that have sometimes been neglected in sociological imaginings of druggedDennis et al. 953

selves and worlds. As the sociology of drugs has embraced the ‘ontological turn’ with

its emphasis on materiality and the ‘more-than-human’, the positive dimensions of

drugs have been the focus of analytic attention. While as noted above, this is a necessary

corrective against the concerns with risks and harms in drug policy and scholarship, a

singular focus on pleasure may neglect the structural inequalities that shape drug prac-

tices and experiences, reinforcing patterns of social disadvantage. In this sense, nar-

cofeminism contributes to critical thinking on the more-than-human that holds onto

these tensions (Farrugia et al., 2019; Martin et al., 2015; Murphy, 2015), including as

staged in this journal and monograph series (Gill et al., 2017; Latimer & López Gómez,

2019; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012). It forces us to confront the tensions between posthu-

manist efforts to disrupt the taken-for-granted status of the human, and the needs of

those who are still fighting for full inclusion into the category of the human and for

recognition of their rights on this basis. Insofar as this collection grapples with these

tensions, The Sociological Review is a fitting outlet for progressing these debates

because in many ways it is with a Sociological Review monograph – Actor Network

Theory and After (Law & Hassard, 1999) and specifically Emilie Gomart and Antoine

Hennion’s influential article, ‘A sociology of attachment: Music amateurs, drug users’

– that a ‘more-than-human’ interest in drug studies emerged over two decades ago.

As we have seen across the collection, narcofeminisms comprise embodied, ethico-

political practices for enacting more liveable worlds with drugs. These are minoritarian

acts of worldbuilding founded on resistance to prohibitionist drug laws and related

regimes of drug control. Narcofeminism acts to intervene in our drug laws, treatment

systems, policy measures and discourses that subject people who use drugs to gendered,

classed and racialised forms of social control. These include criminalisation, incarcera-

tion, stigma, punitive treatment systems, discriminatory policing and drug law enforce-

ment, forcible removal of their children, involuntary psychiatric confinement, police

assault, and the risks of an unregulated drug supply including toxic drug effects and over-

dose. In responses to these threats, narcofeminism does not sit by, engaging in critique

from the sidelines, but actively intervenes to create ‘alterlives’ or better futures with drugs.

As Murphy puts it: ‘With alterlife, [we] want to push back on the eugenic residual that

calculates lives worth living, deviant lives, risky lives, unproductive lives, and killable

lives’ (Murphy, 2017, p. 8). Narcofeminism is oriented to building realities where women

and gender nonconforming people are not only able to exist with drugs, but where their

drug practices are valued for opening up new forms of care, connection and kinship.

Notes

1. 2. The activist in question consented to be interviewed and quoted anonymously. Hence, we

have omitted her name but include the names of the narcofeminist activists who consented for

their contributions to be attributed to them by name.

In referring to narcofeminisms in the lower case, pluralised form we seek to honour the activist

movement who coined the original concept but also to recognise how it has been deployed het-

erogeneously in this collection for understanding drug use as a feminist sociomaterial practice.

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