“You Don’t Look Like a Stoner!”: Gendered Racial Credentialing in the U.S. Legal Cannabis Industry

• In Event: 20417 - Gender and Work at the Margins: Criminalization, Legislation, and Local Context

Abstract

Profit-driven approaches to legalizing cannabis have been touted as reversing the drug war and creating wealth-building opportunities for people of color and women. Yet, most of the wealth produced by the new legal cannabis industry is increasingly concentrated among white men. Based on 59 interviews with differently racialized women workers, executives, and entrepreneurs, this article examines how race and gender inequity are reproduced in the U.S. cannabis industry during legalization. I identify controlling images and ideal worker norms as hegemonic discourses that exclude people of color, benefit white men, and offer conditional advantages to women who reify or embody these discourses, valorizing white femininity as a means to offset the stigma of criminality. I argue these logics constitute a process of gendered racial credentialing that rationalizes the industry’s exclusion of people of color and pre-legalization-era “legacy operators.” This study extends literature on gender, race, and work by analyzing, in real time, how a newly emergent industry becomes stratified as it uses women’s racialized embodied labor in its branding.

Author

• Katie Kaufman Rogers, Regis University