Survival and Resistance on the Margins: Rural Women and the War on Drugs

• In Event: Issues in Rural America

Abstract

How does the War on Drugs impact rural women? This project seeks to answer this question and bridge growing literatures on the gendered impacts of the War on Drugs (Farfán-Méndez 2020, Muehlmann 2013), rural illicit economies (Ballvé 2020, Blume 2021, Sauls et al. 2022), and how individuals and communities resist and respond to drug war related consequences (Fahlberg et al., 2023; Muehlmann 2024). To date, the emerging literature on criminal governance has been highly focused on urban spaces (Barnes 2025, Lessing 2020) and limited scholarship has focused specifically on women’s experiences. We plan to begin addressing this gap and to theorize the diverse ways that women in rural spaces are impacted by the War on Drugs. This collaborative project draws on an interdisciplinary systematic literature review and preliminary evidence from comparative ethnographic work. Using comparative ethnography (Simmons & Smith 2019), we plan to document women’s experiences in three diverse field-sites: one in deep South Georgia, the second in a frontier region of Honduras, and the third in a remote area of Costa Rica. Working across disparate geographic and national settings, with illicit economies ranging from retail markets for crack, meth, and marijuana to international cocaine transshipment to domestic methamphetamine trafficking to coca cultivation zones, we expect to find commonalities in women’s experiences, as well as parallels in how neoliberalism has had distinct and gendered consequences in rural “forgotten” spaces. Finally, we plan to develop policy recommendations for drug policy reforms that are inclusive of the specific needs of rural women.

Authors

• Millie Sanchez Torres, University of Nevada Reno

• Laura Blume, University of Nevada, Reno