Victims and Vamps,Madonnas and Whores

This article explores how the US ‘war on drugs’ depends on certain notions of femininity and womanhood. In particular, I examine how female drug couriers from the Americas are constructed at US border sites of international airports in the 1990s. I find that female drug couriers are described in terms of victims and vamps – a take off of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The victim and vamp discourses, I argue, are the performative enactments of a security state that operates according to a racialized logic of masculinist protection. I hold in tension the circulation of the victim/vamp discourses with the story of Paula, a Colombian woman who was caught trafficking heroin in hidden compartments of her suitcase. I use Paula's story to call attention to the political work in dismissing women as agents in the international drug trade.