The chronotope of the queue: Methadone maintenance treatment and the production of time, space and subjects

This paper considers methadone maintenance treatment as a temporal and spatial phenomenon, a set of practices and arrangements that operate ‘intra-actively’ in response to, and in provocation of, certain kinds of subjects understood as ‘methadone clients’. In doing so, the paper uses Australian interview data on everyday experiences of methadone dosing to look at methadone maintenance treatment in terms of two sets of theoretical concepts: Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope; and Karen Barad's formulations of the space–time manifold and of what she calls iterative intra-activity. The paper argues that in the context of the methadone dosing point, time and space co-produce each other as a chronotope of the queue, and that this chronotope helps materialise particular methadone subjects. Often, these are the very kinds of subjects considered undesirable; that is, the ‘unproductive’, the ‘disorderly’, the ‘illicit’. In light of this, the paper asks whether the demands of the clinic and its convention of queuing reproduce rather than depart from the model of waiting and dependence widely seen as characteristic of lifestyles associated with regular heroin use. In conclusion, the paper considers the policy and practice implications of the chronotope and of its role in methadone maintenance treatment.