Introduction

Abstract

This book is based on an ethnological study of Swedish women’s everyday drug use. A queer phenomenological perspective, paying specific attention to class and gender, is used to analyse the accounts of twelve women aged 25–65 years. The book takes into account the central and increasing role of psychoactive substances in contemporary everyday life, and explores the women’s paths and considerations in relation to their use of drugs. The women in the study use different kinds of stigmatised substances in markedly different ways, and this provides access to perspectives on everyday life from somewhat queer, but not uncommon, angles.The book further problematises how gender and class affect the directions and experiences of lives lived under the effect of drugs, in relation to cultural and societal conceptions of drugs, drug use and people who use drugs. It explores themes based on respondents’ discussions about topics such as stigma, happiness, children, the body, gifts, the drug market, medication, sickness and health. To do this, the book first provides a detailed, contextualising background to drug use in Sweden and the Western world, based on an interdisciplinary weaving together of research and cultural media representations. It provides the reader with historical, sociological, criminological, pharmacological, medical, political, cultural and ethnographic takes on and reflections about the role of drugs and people who use drugs from an intersectional perspective, with a specific focus on class and gender.