Drugs, Sexual Trauma, and the Improvised Labour of Survival

Abstract

This article challenges dominant framings of drug-related sexual violence that position drugs solely as external agents of victimisation, offering instead an analysis of how drugs are entangled with the embodied experience of sexual violence and its traumatic aftermaths. Through case-study analysis of a survivor’s narrative, I trace how her capacities to register, live with, and narrate trauma are constrained by the social, cultural, and institutional systems and structures that determine what kinds of harm are recognisable, whose accounts are credible, and what forms of survival are imaginable. Attending to the body as the site where sexual trauma is lived and reworked, I explore how this survivor attempts to inhabit her sexuality, including through cannabis use as a contingent tool for bodily recuperation. In doing so, the article offers an account of survival as ongoing, improvisational, and negotiated through structural constraint and embodied possibility.