Escape mechanism

Schull, Natasha Dow. “Escape mechanism”. Berkeley Center for Working Families Working Paper No. 41, Berkeley, CA: Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/4122.
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Abstract

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."

Title
Escape mechanism: Women, caretaking, and compulsive gambling
Author
Schull, Natasha Dow
Center
Work and Family Research Network
Genre
working paper
Date Issued
2002
Publisher
Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley
Extent
30 p.
Series Title
Berkeley Center for Working Families Working Paper
Series Number
No. 41
General Note
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.
Persistent Link
http://hdl.handle.net/2345/4122
Use Restrictions
Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States" (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/)

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