Healers, Not Dealers: Women Navigating Controlling Images in the U.S. Cannabis Industry

Through sixty in-depth interviews with women workers, executives, and entrepreneurs in the postprohibition U.S. cannabis industry, this article examines how they frame and discuss themselves in relation to controlling images of criminality and drug use. Stigmatic images of slacker “stoners” and violent “drug dealers”—primarily depicted as low-income, Black or Latina/x/o, and/or men—have long served to justify cannabis prohibition and disparities in criminalization. I observe how women in the cannabis industry differentiate themselves from these images by crafting an occupational identity of distance characterized by white bourgeois femininity. Three discursive strategies constitute this identity of distance: aesthetic distancing , résumé distancing , and maternal distancing . These strategies legitimize women’s participation in legal cannabis markets. However, in relying on hegemonic femininities, these strategies also perpetuate controlling images and reinforce intersecting inequalities among differently racialized women in the industry. Findings illuminate the occupational identity of distance as a mechanism of intersectional inequality for women in the workplace, especially in contested or stigmatized fields.