Maidens at Risk: Date Rape Drugs and Hybrid Risk Knowledges

This insightful article presents an opportunity to rethink traditional approaches to risk management and the study of risk within governmentality analyses. The authors challenge the implicit rationalism often found in studies of risk constitution and management, which tend to focus on formal systems using ‘rational’ techniques like statistics and bureaucratic measures. Instead, they argue that fears and dangers not accounted for in classically rational terms are often intermixed with scientific information.

Key aspects explored in the article include:

• The Chronotope as an Analytical Tool: Moore and Valverde borrow and develop Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotope’, defined as the spatially specific temporality constituting each literary genre. They apply this concept to understand how the risks associated with illicit drugs, often consumed by youth at weekend parties, are perceived as inhering in a specific chronotope rather than solely in the chemicals themselves.
  • The “club,” “raves,” and “frat parties” are presented by governing authorities as a single, unified chronotope: the “club/rave/large youth party”. This specific time-space unit is considered fraught with sexual and pharmacological risks, where women are thought to be at great risk of being drugged and raped, even by friends.
  • This logic is chronotope-specific, meaning that drug use for rape is not portrayed as happening in contexts like daytime coffee shops or doctor’s offices. The space/time is assumed to define the substances consumed in it, and vice versa. For example, Ecstasy, once used in psychotherapy, has become culturally embedded in “the club” and thus, through metonymy, is linked to “date rape drugs” despite its pharmacological properties.
• Formation of Hybrid Risk Knowledges: The article highlights that information about “date rape drugs” is overwhelmingly composed of semi-medical, semi-popular facts and stories, rather than strictly scientific studies. The research site, focused on education efforts to prevent the spread of these drugs, reveals a wide variety of heterogeneous knowledge formats and governing techniques.
  • These “hybrid knowledge formats” combine diverse elements such as medical information, Victorian melodrama, “War on Drugs” discourses, posed photographs, quantitative graphs, and community-police-type ‘safety tips’. This assemblage appeals to multiple dimensions of a female student’s experience and desire, creating a powerful risk information hybrid.
  • This blend of formats means that risk is not solely produced through rational, statistical calculations, challenging the common binary opposition between expert and lay, or scientific and common-sense knowledge. The authors argue against dismissing these scares as mere “moral panics” because it trivializes the experiences of actual rape victims, even if some stories are fantastical.
• Gendering and De-gendering of Sexual Risks: The authors observe a striking paradox: while the chronotope is inherently gendered, educational materials often deny this gender-specific character, presenting risks as simultaneously gendered and de-gendered.
  • Photographs frequently depict stereotypical gender roles, with a young, white woman engaged in hedonistic activity and a lurking male, but the accompanying text tends to avoid explicit gendered terms like “women,” preferring “students” or “youth”.
  • A significant finding is the displacement of criminal intent from the man to the drug itself, with phrases like “the perfect crime in a pill”. This personification of the substance de-genders the criminal act and the desire to assault women, effectively pleasing both feminists (by acknowledging rape prevalence) and law-and-order constituencies (by diverting attention from male perpetrators).
  • “Trusted friends”, almost always implicitly female, are mobilized for collective risk-monitoring, particularly due to the perceived risk of consciousness and memory loss associated with these drugs. This relies on existing female friendship networks, yet the gendered nature of these networks is rarely explicitly acknowledged, possibly to avoid appearing feminist.
  • The narratives, while acknowledging that “nice guys” might slip pills into drinks, still re-inscribe conventional heterosexuality by portraying men as a universal sexual risk to women, while never suspecting women of seducing other women.

In conclusion, the article argues for a more eclectic analysis of risk studies, emphasizing that even exaggerated or mythical risks are not necessarily anti-rational or anti-scientific, but rather exist in complex, hybrid formats that demand a “mixed” analytical approach.

Reference: Moore, D., & Valverde, M. (2000). Maidens at risk: ‘date rape drugs’ and the formation of hybrid risk knowledges. Economy and Society, 29(4), 514–531. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140050174769.