Migration,marginalization and metropolitaneity: negotiation of masculinities of Nepali drug users in Hong Kong

Many studies on men and masculinity have discussed how Asian male migrants who experience a ‘masculinity crisis’ negotiate their masculinity vis-à-vis dominant black and white masculinities in Western societies. Yet, few have discussed how they negotiate their masculinity in the Asian contexts. In this study, Nepalis have a tradition of transnational migration. Their transnational networks have facilitated the development of overseas Nepali communities. This research therefore aims to study the negotiation of masculinities of Nepali male heroin users, a marginalized group in Hong Kong. By using a qualitative mixed-methods approach, it is argued that their negotiation of masculinities is nuanced and relational; intersecting with race/ethnicity, social space, and generation. In the process, discursive resources in the cultural repertoire are utilized to construct alternative forms of masculinities in school, the workplace, and rehabilitation treatment. These masculinities are pluralistic and contingent, in relation to the transnational space and post-colonial situation of Hong Kong.     

Heroin Use as Everyday Radicalism: Opiate Consumers and the Leftist Counter-Culture in Frankfurt am Main, 1970–80

Abstract

This article details the impact of heroin in the early to mid-1970s leftist scene, with a focus on Frankfurt am Main, but an eye to larger developments in West Germany as a whole. Heroin challenged leftist assumptions about substance use and made a deep impact on the West German counter-culture, student left, and New Left at large. Early heroin users saw themselves as part of the left, and the practices of heroin consumption can be usefully seen as a sort of everyday radical praxis. Heroin users saw in the substance a way to ‘do something’ against a society they deemed oppressive. The wider counter-culture never embraced the drug and, indeed, repudiated its use as reactionary much in the same way that they eventually repudiated the violent activism of West German terror groups. As such, heroin users took part in and helped shape the process of splintering and radicalization that defined the early 1970s counter-culture in West Germany.     

Attitudes towards Heroin Addicts and Addiction in Inter-War Greece

Abstract

This article concentrates on the ‘drug scare’ caused by the introduction of heroin to Greece in the inter-war period. It will first retrace the story of heroin’s introduction into the Greek drug scene and assess the reasons for its speedy diffusion among drug users. Following this, it will examine some central themes in the discourse on drugs and heroin in particular, such as the actual or projected harm caused to individuals, society, or the nation as a whole. Then the focus will shift to perceptions of heroin and its users, considering broader debates which circulated in Greek inter-war society, for example, the country’s identity and its position within two parallel and interrelated conceptual frameworks: traditional vs. modern and ‘East’ vs. ‘West’. The paper will conclude by addressing drug users’ self-representations that were influenced, to a certain degree, by the prevailing approaches to drug addiction.