Drugs and Domesticity: Fencing the Nation

Indirect techniques for controlling individuals are advanced, promoted in terms of a moral vocabulary of ‘self-care’. One of the challenges for a national culture disaggregating in this way is how to contain, channel, even profit from the fears, resentment and anxiety that accompanies the loss of various prior forms of security. Here I explore, through analysis of a number of texts, the ways in which the representation of drugs is rallied to this purpose—inciting, concentrating and managing the fear surrounding changes to the economic, political, racial and sexual landscape of our time, while refiguring expectations, demarcations and investments in the public and private domains, and how these spheres of action are made to appear.