Questioning Sex: Drug-Using Women and Heterosexual Relations

Historically, views of sexuality have been used to marginalize poor women, women of color, and colonized women. The concept of deviant sexuality remains discernible today in scientific and popular responses to drug addiction and the AIDS epidemic that essentialize low-income, drug-using women as disease vectors and dangerous mothers. Using data from in-depth qualitative interviews with 28 women, this paper brings to light the perspectives and experiences of these materially and culturally marginalized women—speaking on, interrogating, and analyzing heterosexual relations. This paper finds that commodified (“deviant”) sexual relations are not homogeneous; that some intimate (“normative”) relations incorporate sex as a form of reciprocity; and suggests that these varied forms of exchange are not confined to poor and drug-using women but are consonant with dominant cultural practices. Ultimately the presence and form of exchange are conditioned by women's (and men's) positioning within economic systems and cultural norms delineating gender and sexuality.