Substance Use & Misuse, Early Online:1–15, 2015 Copyright C  2015 Informa Healthcare USA, Inc. ISSN: 1082-6084 print / 1532-2491 online DOI: 10.3109/10826084.2015.978646 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Beyond ‘Doing Gender’: Incorporating Race, Class, Place, and Life Transitions into Feminist Drug Research Jody Miller 1 and Kristin Carbone-Lopez 2 1 School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, USA; 2 University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA This essay draws from our research with US rural women methamphetamine users in 2009 to offer strate- gies for “revisioning” the drug use(r) field to better understand the impact of gender on drug use and drug market participation. We highlight the insights and limitations of a popular strategy in feminist re- search that conceptualizes gender as performance— commonly referred to as “doing gender”—using il- lustrations from our research. We encourage scholars to move beyond a primarily normative orientation in studying gender, and investigate gendered organiza- tional features of social life including their intersec- tions with other aspects of social inequality such as those of race, class, and place. In addition, we suggest that feminist scholars can integrate gender in a rigor- ous way into theoretical perspectives that are typically inattentive to its import, as a means of challenging, en- riching, and refining research on drug use, drug users, and drug market participation. Keywords Doing gender, intersectionality, methamphetamine markets, precocious role entry, life-course research, feminist theory INTRODUCTION In Sexed Work: Gender, Race, and Resistance in a Brook- lyn Drug Market, Lisa Maher (1997) argued that our understanding of women drug users has been severely hampered by two dominant frameworks that undergird the literature: one emphasizing women’s victimization and dependence as the driving force for their drug use, the other depicting them as volitional actors virtually unfet- tered by social constraints. Characterizing these ‘read- ings’ of female drug users, she noted: “The irst practically denies women any agency and the second over-endows We are grateful to the study participants for their time and candor. Without them this research would not have been possible. We also thank Andres Rengifo for generously providing Spanish and French translations of our abstract. Address correspondence to: Jody Miller, School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, 123 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102, USA; Email: jody.miller@rutgers.edu them with it” (1997, p. 1). Maher raised fundamental ques- tions for the drug use(r) ield: How can we improve our un- derstanding of women drug users? Moreover, how might the integration of gender in our scholarship on women’s (and men’s) drug use, and participation in drug networks and markets, produce theoretical and empirical insights that allow for knowledge-building at once more nuanced and more comprehensive? Maher’s critique has inluenced a new generation of scholars who have worked to gender the drug ield, of- ten through attention to women’s bounded agency and resistance, and speciically through the framework of ‘doing gender,’ which emphasizes the performance of gender as situated social action (West & Zimmerman, 1987; see Anderson, Daly, & Rapp, 2009; Evans, Forsyth, & Gaulthier, 2002; Lopez, Jurik, & Gilliard-Matthews, 2009; Measham, 2002; Peralta, Tuttle, & Steele, 2010; Sanders, 2011). Here we suggest that limiting gender re- search to these foci may narrow the scope of the contribu- tions that feminist scholarship can make, and can inadver- tently perpetuate the dualistic constraints Maher (1997) so carefully exposed (see also Miller, 2002, 2014). We do so by discussing both the utility and limitations of this conceptual approach. We critically assess this framework, in part, by pointing to alternative and complementary re- search strategies, the likes of which we suggest offer more promise for a comprehensive understanding of gender’s place in the drug world. Speciically, we call for scholar- ship that simultaneously theorizes gender while also en- gaging with the broader enterprise of theorizing about drugs. It is through such a dialectical approach, we sug- gest, that insights about gender can best challenge and enrich the drug ield (see also Miller & Mullins, 2006; Simpson, 2000). To illustrate our position, we draw from our research with women methamphetamine users in Missouri, USA 1 Subst Use Misuse Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by University of Missouri - St Louis on 02/27/15 For personal use only.