In Her Words: Understanding Push and Pull Factors to Women’s Involvement with Drugs in Sweden through an Intersectional Lens

There is relatively little research on women’s involvement with drugs in the Nordic area. While women’s experiences have enjoyed greater attention in the literature than previously (Chesney-Lind and Chagnon, 2016), many analyses appear to consider gender as a single variable in addition to class. Further, gender has become synonymous with women, ‘as if the other, the general’ were not also similarly gendered (Lander, 2018, p. 26, my translation). This, alone, can only partially help to understand people’s unique experiences and it risks strengthening the idea that women can be only of marginal importance in this field, whilst ignoring the nuances characterising different experiences.

My work aims to show both the risks and pleasures associated with drug involvement through an intersectional lens. This entails looking at both push and pull factors experienced by women whilst considering ‘the intersection of multiple dimensions of social stratification’ (Creek and Dunn, 2014, p. 41; Crenshaw, 1989). I am therefore interested in not only looking at how sexist and classist structures characterise the experiences of drug-involved women, but also in considering how these interact with other categories of being, such as racialisation, nativity, and so forth (Crenshaw, 1989).