Tensions within Identity: Notes on How Criminalized Women Negotiate Identity through Addiction

Abstract

Drawing on conceptualizations of a loss of personal power versus empowerment, criminalized women in Canada engage two seemingly opposed discourses to explain their substance use. When feeling a loss of control/power participants constructed substance use as a disease, and when feeling in control of their substance use they described becoming substance free as based on an empowered choice to use/quit using. This article explores the connection between choice/disease discourses and correctional treatment discourses through an examination of women’s narratives about identity management and negotiation related to substance use. Based on 22 life history interviews with formerly incarcerated women and four social workers who assist criminalized women as they transition from prison to the community, this research suggests that criminalized women construct a distinct drug using or ‘addict’ identity that they separate from their ‘true’ or core conceptualization of self.