Recovering Women

Feminisms And The Representation Of Addiction

Melissa Friedling

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000309195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This book is dedicated to the memories of Robert Branham, my professor at Bates College, whose teaching, scholarship, and humanity continue to inspire and sustain me, and to my grandma, Dorothy Grosser, whose beauty, spirit, and love are with me all the time. I would also like to thank Leighton Pierce, Franklin Miller, Michael McGee, Lauren Rabinowitz, Doris Witt, Camille Seaman, and Bruce Gronbeck at the University of Iowa for their wisdom, guidance, generosity, and support. I am especially grateful to Barbara Biesecker, my teacher, colleague, and friend, who offered perceptive comments on the manuscript and unfailing encouragement. My appreciation also goes out to the University of Iowa Graduate College, which assisted me with the award of a Seashore Dissertation Year Fellowship. At Syracuse University, I am indebted to Jane Marsching, Doug Dubois, Mark Durant, Jude Lewis, John Orentlicher, Loren Schwerd, and Owen Shapiro for their art, friendship, and constructive advice. Additional thanks go to John Sloop, and Catherine Murphy, Lisa Wigutoff, and Myia Williams at Westview Press.

1
Addiction, Rhetoric, and Feminism: The Ballad of (Hetero) Sexual Dependency

The 1982 book, Edie: An American Biography, tells the story of the short, drug-addled, celebrity life of Edie Sedgwick.¹ Born into American pedigree and privilege, Edie was one of eight children in a family dominated by an abusive father.² By the age of thirteen, Edie was anorexic and bulimic. At age nineteen, she was sent to several private mental hospitals where she discovered her talent for art, her fashionable penchant for black tights, and also her aptitude for getting around rules (she became pregnant and had an abortion during her commission at Bloomingdale, the notoriously restrictive Westchester Division of New York Hospital). At age twenty, she went directly to Harvard—the family alma mater—to study art. At Harvard she exclusively befriended very smart, very beautiful gay men—"very nitroglycerine queens” and “Harvard dandies.”³ However, after two of her brothers (Harvard graduates) committed suicide, Edie left Cambridge and moved to New York, where she was able to accelerate her climb to celebrity status, spending her inheritance on thousands of dollars a week of clothing, makeup, limousines, and other extravagances, further cultivating her chic “look.” She frequented old society clubs and the new discotheques, where she became an instant hit, dancing excessively and doing everything to the furthest extent of indulgence. When she wandered in with her entourage to Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1965, she immediately became his new superstar. They went everywhere together and she began to look and dress like him—whisper-thin and ghostly pale in black tights and boat-neck striped T-shirts, topped off with short, shaggy, silver-streaked hair. She starred in numerous early Warhol films including Vinyl (1965), Space (1965), and Kitchen (1965). In 1965 she was dubbed a “Youthquaker” in a Vogue magazine pictorial and became the most famous, most fashionable girl in New York, while high on amphetamines most of the time. She modeled, partied, and lived in the infamous Chelsea Hotel and, in her own words, “blossomed into a healthy young drug addict.”⁴ She starred in Ciao! Manhattan, which was basically the story of a day in New York in the life of Edie Sedgwick—the debutante drug-addict, sixties underground hipster, and fashion trendsetter.⁵ She moved back to California, was in and out of mental hospitals, underwent intensive electroshock treatments, and got breast implants (in 1971!) before resuming her role in the extended production of Ciao! Manhattan—Edie’s farewell performance. She died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971 at the age of twenty-eight.

The point of this summary is to offer a working sketch of the “addicted woman”—notably young, white, and economically privileged—who crops up again and again everywhere in American cultural productions as she has grown into an object of mass fascination. Not only is she virtually ubiquitous in popular culture, she is also prolifically represented in the more ratified domain of contemporary art. Moreover, her image has been accompanied by copious feminist discussion about the pathological female body. This intersection of popular/fine art interests in female addiction with feminist concerns led to the question I will centrally address in this book: How can a feminist critic read these representations of addicted women who appear in various cultural sites? For numerous reasons that are discussed below, the addicted woman, who is regularly treated in a whole range of discourses, remains a troubling figure in a contemporary feminist struggle. The rest of this book investigates why her unsettling image emerges and persists in diverse cultural productions and why it may be so compelling for feminist debate. The lasting impression of Edie Sedgwick that I invoked at the outset will remain a touchstone for my interests in such questions and my attempts to reconcile the consistent and enduring representations of addicted women with feminist critique.

Overall, Recovering Women is about feminism and its status in intellectual discourse and movement politics. As I hinted above, I have framed this discussion of feminism with the question of addiction. Perhaps addiction seems like an odd tangent for a project that seeks to clarify the status of feminism, one of the most defining intellectual and cultural features of the latter half of the twentieth century. But addiction is not tangential to the question of feminism. What I argue in this book is that feminism repeatedly emerges as a contemporary question through the representations of addiction. In other words, addiction has become a rhetorical exigence for the question of feminism; not the only one and not an originary one, but one that has prompted feminism to address the binary oppositions that representations of addiction are bound to disturb. The most notable opposition is the structuring division between mind and body. This division has guided the movement of feminism over the past three decades to redress the ways in which women have been excluded, misrepresented, or both by a dominant tradition that distinguishes a more embodied femininity from a more reasoned masculinity. Feminists have challenged patriarchal rationalizations of male domination that have served to oppress women by conceiving of women as more corporeal than men and hence objects rather than agents of symbolization, sociality, and culture. However, the representation of addiction potentially threatens dominant binary logics of mind/body dualism since addiction is simultaneously understood to be both a physiological (disease) and a cognitive (question of will) phenomena. This disruption of binary logic also jeopardizes the guarantee of addiction’s paired term, voluntarism, and in turn disrupts the dependency/autonomy, passive/active, sickness/health, queer/normal, female/male, black/white dyads central to dominant logics that affirm the ascendancy of the second term. Hence, the structural “crisis” indicated by representations of addiction are central to feminist concerns. Simultaneously, I will show, feminism is itself called into question by the same crisis.

Addiction and the Question of Feminism

Traditions of feminist thought and practice have been attentive to the representation, deployment, and significance of pathological attributions specific to women. In the late twentieth century, the female addict (contemporary inheritor of hysteria) has primarily been understood through pathologizing disease models of treatment.⁶ This disease paradigm searches for common pathologies and links them to the nature of women’s bodies. Within this paradigm, the “expert” diagnosis of a prevalence of eating disorders, drug dependency, and depression among women has legitimated the disciplinary medicalization of women’s bodies. Following the assumption that corporeal habits are characteristic expressions of culture, a strategy of feminist response has been to reclaim women’s bodies in the interest of various feminist agendas.⁷ Within this tradition of feminist response, women’s pathological expressions (most notably hysteria) have been represented either as symptomatic of an oppressive system or as feminine interventions into the symbolic and unique expressions of protest.⁸ Female pathologies have been read and often valorized as evidence of women’s creative struggle to cope with the social contradictions of their time. Problematically, this strategy insists on female suffering as the prerequisite for feminist agency and is complicit with the patriarchal ideals of the docile, submissive, and accommodating woman. Some of these recovery strategies can be found in several popular feminist discourses that have refigured female addiction as a metaphor for a restrictive patriarchal social order and are revealing of the way addiction has been treated, as embodied protest in a wide range of feminist frameworks.

Lindsy Van Gelder, contributing to a 1987 issue of Ms. magazine, makes a connection between patriarchy and female addiction, drawing on the notion of female dependency as the most pervasive form of women’s subordination in a patriarchal system. Van Gelder connects the destructive way in which women stay in bad relationships to an addictive behavior, characterized by the submission to a stronger force that has traditionally been male. If women are not dependent on a man, they learn to transfer their dependencies elsewhere, causing women to be perpetually “cross-addicted,” misdiagnosed, and mistreated by the medical system.⁹ Similarly, popular feminist women’s health adviser Christiane Northrup also invokes addiction, renaming patriarchy “the addictive system.” It is a system, she argues, that devalues women’s bodies, demands that they be controlled, considers the body to be subordinate to the brain, and regards technological intervention to be necessarily more effective than nurturing. Northrup maintains that this addictive system habitually denies women choices by denigrating their bodies and binding women within the aggressive patriarchal disease/care paradigm.¹⁰

These feminist critiques conclude that addiction is a symptom of a woman’s backlash against the disciplinary regimes that have contained her expressive desires and wills.¹¹ Extending this logic, some feminist approaches have valorized addictions as liberatory rhetorics. Hysterical symptoms are understood as subversive in their rejection of the symbolic order of patriarchy. Most notably, feminist interpreters of the meaning of anorexia in American culture have attempted a radical inversion of conventional notions of anorexia: from pathological self-destructive behavior typical of women into a creative form of feminist protest and empowerment. Popular self-help recovery narratives about anorexia like Susie Or-bach’s Hunger Strike and Kim Chernin’s The Hungry Self suggest that anorexia should be understood as a subversive form of rebellion and the only form of protest available to women who, denied access to public speech, must engage in political discourse with their bodies.¹² Chernin suggests that anorexia is about the search for identity and Orbach reads anorexia nervosa as a subversive articulation of the oppression of women today and as a metaphor for our time. For these critics, anorexia is one extreme on a continuum in which all women find themselves, insofar as they are vulnerable to the requirements of the cultural construction of femininity. The anorectic is then engaging in a political discourse through her “hunger strike” and the transformation of the body expresses through her body what she cannot tell us in words; an indictment of a culture that suppresses female needs. This argument suggests that feminists must make a virtue out of a necessity by extolling the merits of these disorders as forms of feminine protest and rebellion, or even that the starving anorexic is the feminist par excellence. Such feminist interpretations of addiction—including anorexia—as symptomatic of patriarchy or as uniquely female symbolic forms of protest perpetuate a recovery model of social change that reinscribes a prerequisite submission to therapeutic discourses.

As succeeding chapters will show, radical/liberal consciousness-raising feminism, academic psychoanalytic feminism, and “third-wave” feminism each variously deploy therapeutic metaphors portraying feminism as a recovery movement and a cure for male-centered culture, history, and language. These recovery rhetorics remain confined to and complicitous with traditional binary calculations of mind and body and operations of power/resistance within dominant institutional structures. Throughout this book, I maintain that curative approaches to the representation of addiction employ models of individual and social change that seek to recuperate a healed or normal condition that might be accessed through a feminist recovery rhetoric. Recovering Women considers the prominence of recovery as a model for historical, cultural, and political order functioning in American feminisms and in American popular culture at large. I understand recovery to include discourses (clinical, philosophical, political, and popular) acting in the service of heteronormativity—the normativizing laws that confirm the reproduction of the Same through a complex set of dictates on the representations of (race, ethnicity, sex, age, and class) difference. Recovery rhetoric restores order to some presumed disorder and offers patronizing compensation for some founding loss. Curative models of female agency in recovery reaffirm a normal or essential female situation that may be reclaimed through the pacifying rituals, disciplinary practices, and self-directed criticisms entailed in a cure. As such, they reinscribe the very normative operations and terms of binary thinking that feminisms might redress.

At the end of the century, the question of feminism is the question of feminism’s legitimacy. Has feminism outlived its usefulness for addressing women’s concerns? Is there even a community of women to which feminism might address itself? Can feminism handle historical and intellectual developments that have impacted the status of women, including postmodernism, AIDS, and queer theory? To all these questions, I answer affirmatively, but only if feminism surpasses its own tendencies for recovery rhetorics that reify dominant binary pairings. By noticing enactments and representations of addiction in various areas of cultural production, I hope to stipulate an alternative to feminist recoveries of these important sites and offer a direction for feminist advocacy and agency that would continue to level a palpable threat to the hegemony of straight, white, bourgeois, male privilege. A rereading of the representations of addiction without recourse to recovery may present an opportunity for feminist intervention that refuses to reify the essentializing reductions and misogynist conflations of woman with diseased Other and refuses to forget the representations, stories, and testimonies of women who have and continue to suffer the pain, confinement, and guilt of pathologizing discourses and disciplinary practices.

Performative Interpretations and Methodologies

Historically, addiction has been associated with the interarticulation and complex crossings of a whole range of differences including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and religious-cultural identity. The addict first emerged in the nineteenth century amid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and the appearance of new technologies of production and reproduction.¹³ National decline was seen as a consequence of growing economic tensions and the “discovery” of addiction marked a clear indication of the extent of the fears and anxieties associated with these historical developments. The same changes prompted shifts in the dominant understanding of the sexually differentiated body and its potentially degenerative impact on the “purity” of the racial stock. The discovery of the “disease” of addiction coincided with “scientific” conclusions and the growing unease concerning the reproductive capacities of the woman as an infectious agent. These fears were also confirmed by miscegenation injunctions and justified by racial sciences that indicted certain races as more susceptible to addiction. Self-identity has always looked anxiously to the pathological Other for its confirmation and it is in the unified addict identity that racial sciences found a generalizable diseased Other. Addiction became the unified identificatory structure that circumscribed and contained the excessive discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, and sex.¹⁴ Eve Sedgwick observes that such an addict identity emerged primarily in opposition to its paired term, voluntarism, and the “disease” of addiction spread as an “epidemic of will” among marginalized others.¹⁵ Sedgwick writes: “Under the taxonomic pressure of the newly ramified and pervasive medical-juridical authority of the late nineteenth-century, and in the context of changing class and imperial relati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Photos
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Addiction, Rhetoric, and Feminism: The Ballad of (Hetero) Sexual Dependency
• 2 Drew Barrymore’s Coming of Age(ncy): The Performance of Addiction and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism
• 3 Funny, She Doesn’t Look Drew-ish: Jewish Addicts and the “Truth” of Recovery
• 4 Recovering the “Special Issue” of Feminist Art and Performance: Women, Children, and Lesbians Last
• 5 Passing, Queering, and Recovering: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Performance of Plastic Surgery
• 6 Nan Goldin’s Retrospective and Recovery: Framing Feminism, AIDS, and Addiction
• Bibliography
• Index