Latin american feminist antiprohibitionist epistemologies to redefining the link between gender and drugs

Abstract

For half a century, a necropolitics (Mbembé, 2011) has been adopted to address the issue of drugs. Women and feminized bodies became the object of disciplining and control in the context of a gore capitalism (Valencia, 2010) that sustains the necroprohibitionist paradigm of drug control (Mariotta, 2020). The rhetoric of combating drug trafficking through the war on drugs as a security strategy is the visible face of this paradigm. Its flip side is the sustained growth of women imprisoned for drug offenses associated with microtrafficking (Youngers et al., 2020). This article addresses the link between gender and drugs from a novel perspective, such as Latin American antiprohibitionist feminism. For that, a brief genealogy of this link is outlined, from the abstinence movements led by women (Okrent, 2021), to the formation of the current Latin American antiprohibitionist feminism (Malheiro, 2020). A systematization of the experience resulting from the participatory action-research developed from an articulation of Latin American collectives that build antiprohibitionist feminism and promote the political formation of women and dissidence is presented. Finally, the structuring concepts of Latin American feminist antiprohibitionist epistemology and its research-action methodologies are synthesized in order to introduce antiprohibitionism in feminist struggles.