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Shadow Play: Punishment and Addiction in Female Drug Literature
Conference presentation

Shadow Play: Punishment and Addiction in Female Drug Literature

Nycole Prowse
2012 University Research Conference Program Book, p.22
USC Research Conference, 2012 (Sunshine Coast, Australia, 09-Jul-2012–13-Jul-2012)
University of the Sunshine Coast
2012
url
https://www.usc.edu.au/View
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Abstract

Literary Studies punishment
Michel Foucault's analysis of the evolution of punishment over the past 200 years in his polemic Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), parallels the history of addiction and its eventual move into the realm of jurisprudence. That is, the evolution of punishment and regulation of the subject aligns with the construct of addiction from moral and medical models of concern to one of vice. Addiction as vice is justified in a penal/judicial paradigm that progressively became less concerned with the offence, the crime, the act and more concerned with the individual: 'what they are, will be, may be' (Foucault 18). These 'shadows' embody the drug user making him/her criminal. The regulated and ritualized process of torture/pain within the paradigm of punishment is also reflected in the discourse of addiction. In Anna Kavan's story 'Julia and the Bazooka' the hypodermic needle is analogized as a weapon, a 'bazooka' which she uses as defense against oppressive societal constraints. Kavan's protagonist, found dead with her bazooka in her hand, intimates the hypodermic needle as both instrument of torture and of crime, shadowing and extending Foucauldian analysis to show a collapse of juridical binaries of punishment/crime; vice/virtue. The instrument of torture is one of agency and the power that is beholden to it, is within the hands of the 'criminal/addict'. The tracks on the protagonist/addict's body are an inscription heralding this subversion. These signs of 'torture', reflected in 'confessional' drug literature, both mimic and mock the juridical forms of punishment, power and control over the non-conforming subject. The confessor/addict is made honorable, valuable and authentic. The carnivalesque nature of the criminal's confession on the scaffold is also analogous to drug literature where rules are inverted; authority is mocked; heroes are criminals.

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