Narcofeminism: A feminist auto-ethnography on drugs

Abstract

Narcofeminism began in 2019 as a rallying principle for women who use drugs to establish links between feminist organising and drug user activism. This article elaborates narcofeminism as a site of feminist resistance to patriarchal orders and modes of rationality. It presents an auto-ethnographic account and examples of drug user activism to explore drug use as a form of resistance to dominant social orders. Woven through this auto-ethnographic account is a discussion of the political imperatives of my experiences as an ‘Othered’ subject. Building on my 2020 piece featured in a flagship book on women, gender and drug policy, it pushes for a recognition of the diverse perspectives of women who use drugs and seeks to bestow more authority to voices with lived experience. It concludes with a discussion of how we might forge empathetic connections between the Feminist Self and Feminist ‘Others’ in our common embodied experiences of marginality, even if separated by context, time and space.