Escape mechanism Women, caretaking, and compulsive gambling

Escape mechanism

Women, caretaking, and compulsive gambling

Schull

Natasha Dow

Schull, Natasha Dow

Author

University of California, Berkeley

Center for Working Families

University of California, Berkeley. Center for Working Families

Sponsor

text

working paper

Berkeley, CA Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley 2002 2002 monographic

Berkeley, CA

Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley

2002

monographic

English eng

English

eng

electronic application/pdf 30 p. born digital

electronic

application/pdf

30 p.

born digital

In this working paper I explore the links between caretaking responsibilities, video poker machines, and female compulsive gambling. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with women video poker addicts in Las Vegas, I suggest that they have discovered a highly addictive mechanism of escape from what they experience as an excess of relational demands at home and at work. The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) I argue that the desire for such an escape is symptomatic of unresolved anxieties and tensions surrounding the place of care in our discursively individualist society, and, (2) I argue that the gaming industry, by engineering consumer technologies that capitalize on this desire, is implicated in the phenomenon of machine addiction among women. These arguments offer alternatives to a neoliberal understanding of excessive gambling as poor exercise of "free choice" and a related biomedical understanding of excessive gambling as a genetically based "pathology."

Natasha Dow Schull is a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Working Families and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Berkeley Center for Working Families Working Paper No. 41

Berkeley Center for Working Families Working Paper

No. 41

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wfn_bwpaper_51.pdf

MChB English eng

MChB

English eng

English

eng