Cultures of Intoxication: Young Women, Alcohol, and Harm Reduction

Abstract

Much attention has been paid in the last decade to the “cultures of intoxication” of modern Western societies such as Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. This has manifested in an intense focus on the amount of alcohol that young people in particular consume per session and their resultant practices. This article explores young women's drinking cultures and focuses instead on their social motivations for socializing in specific places as well as their emotional connections to these particular spaces. The role of alcohol is reflected on within these motivations and connections in relation to the way it engenders particular practices. Places of risk (as well as pleasure) are identified and considered in terms of harm-reduction interventions. Young women's drinking practices are also positioned within a neoliberal social context, producing tensions in their engagement with, and negotiation of, cultures of intoxication. Harm-reduction initiatives need to speak to these tensions and to avoid producing campaigns based on conservative ideals of femininity and respectability.

‘You don’t ditch your girls’: young Māori and Pacific women and the culture of intoxication

“…Alcohol was peripheral to the more formal occasions such as after-work drinks and at events where there was structured entertainment. The dependent relationships between the nature of an occasion and the levels of alcohol consumption have been noted by other studies of young women's drinking patterns, both in a New Zealand context (Hutton et al, 2013), and elsewhere (Measham, 2006).…”

“…Notions of femininity and gender are seen as fluid, not fixed and are subject to change according to the practices of enactment (West & Zimmerman, 1987). In the same way that young women have been found to move between different femininities according to a variety of factors as they use alcohol (Hutton, Wright, & Saunders, 2013), it is of interest (and importance) to understand how young Māori and Pacific women negotiate their femininities in relation to cultural norms that may be overlooked by harm reduction initiatives that address 'young women' as a homogenous group.…”

“…Anonymising participants would also ensure that the friendship groups employed to capture data would not be jeopardized in any way. The customary methods of assuring anonymity (using pseudonyms, for example) carried too much risk with respect to achieving these aims in this particular project (Hutton et al, 2013;Wiles, 2013).…”

Defining “drinking culture”: A critical review of its meaning and connotation in social research on alcohol problems

“…It has also highlighted the different norms and drinking practices that operate across groups, settings and gender. This is also a point that Hutton, Wright and Saunders (2013) make in relation to young women's drinking cultures in New Zealand, albeit in terms of identifying risky and pleasurable places in order to inform harm reduction interventions.…”

The Dynamic Risk of Heavy Episodic Drinking on Interpersonal Assault in Young Adolescence and Early Adulthood

“…In order to proxy for gender, the available dichotomous sex variable (male/female) was employed as an explanatory variable. This approach has been adopted elsewhere (see e.g, Ostergaard 2007, Measham 2002 and facilitates an examination of the distinctions between male and female drinking patterns and associated behavioural outcomes, given that experiences of drinking are likely to be different for males and females (Hutton et al 2013, Ostergaard 2007 as it the probability of violent outcomes (Finney 2004, Fagan 1990, McVeigh 2005, Matthews and Richardson 2005.…”