Substance and Substitution

Reviews
'Substance and Substitution is an extremely impressive work of scholarship and a genuine advance on existing studies of methadone maintenance treatment and of drug use more generally. It marries innovative theory with diverse empirical materials, and goes beyond a number of well-established binaries (e.g. resistance/conformity, social/material, body/mind, morality/medicine) in trying to understand the ‘co-production’ of substance, time, identities and gender.' - David Moore, Associate Professor, National Drug Research Institute, Australia.

Description
Located between three powerful phenomena, public health, the law and social stigma, methadone maintenance treatment attracts loyal advocates, vociferous critics and innumerable engaged onlookers. This book combines contemporary science studies theory with in-depth interviews, policy documents and media texts to examine this controversial approach to addiction, providing a unique approach to the understanding of illicit drugs. Arguing that methadone maintenance treatment depends for its rationale on two contradictory, yet equally powerful images - the disordered, compulsive heroin user and the responsible, choosing subject of contemporary health care - this book traces the ways the program both reproduces and disrupts conventional understandings of what it means to be human, a citizen, a woman or man, questioning, as it does so, the conditions under which treatment is delivered.

Contents
Introduction
1 Substitution, Metaphor and Authenticity
2 Governing Treatment
3 The Chronotope of the Queue
4 Treatment Identities
5 Repetition and Rupture: The Gender of Agency
Conclusion: Dependence, Contingency and the Productivity of Problems

Author Biographies
SUZANNE FRASER is Lecturer at the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include gender, science, the body and health. She is the author of Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture.

KYLIE VALENTINE is a Research Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature.
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Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan