Suchergebnisse

In this important contribution to the field, Ilana Mountian critically analyses discourses surrounding drug addiction, drug prohibition, treatment and prevention, and highlights new ways of understanding the role that gender plays in the ethics of drug use across cultures. The book analyses the discourses of religion, criminality and medicine, and shows how they, combined with key historical events, affect our views of drug use and drug users based on gender, race and class. The book draws on research from a variety of fields to provide alternative conceptual and methodological perspectives on the subject, including: --critical theory --gender studies --post-colonial studies --psychoanalysis --philosophy. Cultural Ecstasies is an innovative study of drugs and addiction, and will be of great interest to students, researchers and professionals working in psychology, sociology, social work, health care, criminology, and allied disciplines. Ilana Mountian is an Honorary Research Fellow and a member of the Discourse Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She also currently holds a postdoctoral research position at the Universidade de São Paolo, Brazil. Publisher's note.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to debate intersectionality as a key methodological aspect for critical research. While intersectionality is a consensus for critical studies, it is important to highlight the challenges that a perspective that consider power relations across social categories put forward. For this, I examine how these relations are seen in research, and highlight the risks of hierarchical views on social categories, or the invisibilization of those same categories.


Design/methodology/approach
These reflections will be primarily based on previous research on immigration in São Paulo and on older transsexual women in Brazil, studies that required a multi-faceted analysis. The studies were based on critical feminist, post-colonial studies and psychoanalysis to examine discourses and to unravel the social imaginaries on the immigrant and on transsexual women in Brazil. For this, I bring forth the notion of the other as a discursive space often placed on these groups, and how the discursive position also reflect views on gender, race, sexuality and class as structural discursive boundaries in Brazil.


Findings
Taking the border as a metaphor to read everyday encounters, the body becomes a mark of difference, where subjects are placed at specific discursive (and also geographical) positions – at the center or at the margins. Taking this into account, the paper highlights two main aspects: first, a debate on the importance of intersectionality for critical methodological frameworks, and second, how critical discourse analysis allow us to defy the taken-for-granted binary constructions of other-us, that are continuously re-evoked and reified in discourse.


Originality/value
This debate is important as there are innumerous ways of approaching intersectionality, hence a critical analysis into current debates and methodological standpoints become central.