Reproducing Bodies and Governing Motherhood: Drug-Using Women and Reproductive Loss

Abstract

We argue that gender and gendered social norms actively define the reproducing body, as well as female bodies with or without reproductive potential, and the pregnant body.¹ This chapter demonstrates how the larger political climate and policy environment shapes responses to illicit drug use by women from diverse backgrounds, limiting the likelihood they will receive treatment and escalating the likelihood they will be punished in some way. We attend to a regulatory regime of reproduction in which a variety of powerful normative disciplinary practices determine what sorts of bodies should reproduce even in this ‘post-disciplinary’ age. The assumptions of the classical approach to understanding the causes and consequences of substance abuse still structure the disciplinary practices with which pregnant ‘addicts’ are met in respect to reproduction. We aim to trace the cultural representations of pregnancy and drug use with regards to our ‘bodily obsessed’ society, examine the regulatory regime of biosocial reproduction with special reference to pregnancy and drugs, and look closely at the ‘real’ material sites or gendered bodies upon which the classically assumed chaos, contagion, and disorder of drug use are inscribed.