Tuesday 28th March 7-8pm Eastern Australian Time / 9-10am British Summer Time (online)
The Sobriety, Abstinence and Moderation Cluster and Women and Alcohol Cluster invite you to join us for an online seminar exploring themes of gender, social class and contemporary (non)drinking practices with a particular focus on the Australian context:
Programme:
Amy Pennay (Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, La Trobe University Australia)
A cross-national qualitative analysis of gender amidst declining youth drinking
Significant declines in drinking among young people have been recorded in many high-income countries over the past 20 years. This analysis aimed to provide insight into whether and how gender might be implicated in declining youth drinking, with a focus on women’s data. Interview data from four independent qualitative studies from Australia, Denmark, Sweden and the UK were analysed. We found that women and states of intoxication were pejoratively described in gendered terms (e.g., bitchy, hysterical). Non- and light-drinking on the other hand offered opportunities for expressing alternate and desirable configurations of femininities. Our findings offer insight into how young people’s enactions of gender are embedded in, and evolve alongside, these large declines in youth drinking.
Belinda Lunnay (Research Centre for Public Health Equity and Human Flourishing, Torrens University Australia)
“Glorified cordial”: How social class distinctions are re-made through women’s perspectives on no and low alcohol product consumption
Women’s alcohol consumption during midlife (aged 45-64) is continually increasing and poses threats to disease prevention. Public health approaches designed to curb consumption are not taking effect. We looked to innovate responses by observing the momentum of the ‘sober curious’ wellness movement among younger populations and we wondered what factors impact women’s preparedness to reduce alcohol and can the sober curious movement be leveraged to support women with making alcohol reductions? Globally, ‘sober curious’ movements are rapidly gaining popularity. They promote sustained reduced drinking lifestyles as socially desirable. An important scaffolding to the movement is a rapidly growing range of no- or low-alcohol (NoLo) products now available in bars, bottle shops and supermarkets. Our research explored women’s perceptions about consuming NoLos in accordance with their different life chances and reasons for drinking. I will share data collected through 27 open-ended interviews with ‘sober-curious’ Australian women (45-64 years) from different social class positions (working vs middle/affluent) in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. Applying Bourdieu’s relational model of social class, we found NoLos provide middle/affluent women with an alcohol alternative that supports reductions. These women described drinking as a celebration and to achieve social connections, and how in these contexts, NoLos have social value. They represent ‘wellness’ and are a positive and desirable ‘good’, albeit without psychoactive effects. NoLos are also highly commodified products that we found operate as symbolic capital, conferring status and privilege upon middle/affluent class women who have the cultural ‘know how’ to select particular brands, to purchase and to drink them. On the other hand, working class women, who drink to cope with difficult lives and to relieve boredom, stress or loneliness, questioned the advantages of drinking NoLos - “I would just drink water” (one working class woman said) rather than “glorified cordial” (one affluent class woman’s description of NoLos). We found NoLos are unaffordable, and not worthwhile for this group – they are no help with feelings of coping, nor are there gains to be made in terms of recognition of cultural capital and social class mobility. For this group alternative features of the sober curious movement need to be explored for leverage potential in supporting women to reduce alcohol. I will discuss options.
Kristen Foley (Torrens University Australia)
Social class and the actualities of self-making via alcohol consumption, stockpiling, happiness and wellness during the 2020 crisis lockdowns for Australian women in midlife
COVID-19 lockdowns to mitigate viral spread during 2020 confined people to their homes for reasons except ‘essential services’ – which in Australia included to purchase alcohol. Before the pandemic, we interviewed 50 women 2017-2019 about alcohol consumption, and 40 agreed to reinterview during 2020 lockdowns (n=90 interviews). Women were aged 45-64 and represented different social class positions informed by Bourdieusian logic. Data analysis used pre-coding, conceptual/thematic categorisation, and theoretical interpretation. This presentation collates our published work by theme – alcohol consumption and reduction, stockpiling, happiness and wellness – in relation to social class and the actualities for consuming alcohol as part of ‘self-making’. During the pandemic, women in middle class positions worked dutifully to pursue happiness and stay well, stockpiling the most alcohol of women in all classes. Women in working class positions described that drinking provided emotional relief in lieu of happiness and was one of few ‘tools’ that kept them ‘well’, although limited economic capital precluded stockpiling. Women in affluent class positions had well-stocked cellars before the pandemic emerged, so needed to stockpile less, but their narratives indicated they could access alternatives to alcohol consumption to pursue wellness and happiness. Relationships to alcohol therefore took form according to cultural and neoliberal imperatives to ‘make selves’ that are well and happy despite pandemic uncertainty; yet the opportunities to do so segmented commensurate to the capital available to women. Approaches that seek to support women with alcohol reduction must consider these important social class-based differences in women’s self-making and the alternatives to alcohol women can access.
Discussant: Filip Djordjevic (La Trobe University Australia)
Please contact emily.nicholls@york.ac.uk if you have any queries or require the Zoom link.
Dorota Dias-Lewandowska, Pam Lock, Women, Home, and Alcohol: Constructed Façades and Social Norms in Nineteenth-Century Polish and British Representations of Female Drinking Practices, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2023;, vcad004, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad004
Abstract
Drinking practices are closely connected to human geography. No matter whether we choose to drink in public, private, or secretly, where we drink is closely connected to how and what we drink. Alcohol-related behaviour by women, enacted at home, can undermine or challenge social norms. However, the transgressive nature of drinking could lead to physical exile or the masking of women’s desire for self-determination. We explore how the social construct of the respectable, decent home relied heavily on façades to ‘keep up appearances’. We demonstrate the place of alcohol in building these façades, and revealing them for what they were. Alcohol in this context was much more than a simple relief for women whether they were a stressed entrepreneur, a violent spinster, or a suicidal mistress. The tensions between the actions of the eight figures examined and the expectations of patriarchal culture represented in these façades demonstrate the extent to which society shaped women’s behaviour towards alcohol in Poland and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Glasgow
1-5 August 2022
Women and Alcohol Research Cluster is delighted to announce our next online seminar
dr Lucy Cogan (University of Galway) “Researching 'Drunkenness, Compulsion and the Disintegration of the Self: Erasmus Darwin’s Theory of Ebrietas in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth.’”
Sally Sanger, University of Sheffield
Women and online alcohol recovery groups: conformity and empowerment
Sally will explore gender-related findings from a study of alcohol online recovery support groups. She will draw on an analysis of forum posts and interviews to discuss users' (sometimes surprising) assumptions about gender in the groups. The talk will touch on issues such as motherhood, female ageing, and society’s view of female drinking, and will speculate as to why online alcohol support groups seem to attract so many women.
Claire Davey, Canterbury Christ Church University
‘Goodbye mindless drinking and hello mindful living’: Sobriety as gendered self-care?
Laura Fenton is a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, where she works on the Youth Drinking in Decline project, and at the University of Manchester, where she is conducting research for the Austerity and Altered Lifecourses project. Laura completed her PhD in sociology in 2018. Her thesis investigated the drinking biographies of three generations of British women born between the 1940s and '90s. Laura's research interests include gender, youth, lifecourse, alcohol and biographical methods.
Iain Smith, University of Glasgow and NHS Forth Valley
Dr. Smith has specialised in the field of addiction psychiatry as a Consultant for 29 years now and as well as maintaining a busy clinical practice, has been closely involved with training on alcohol-related topics for both medical students and postgraduate doctors and other health professionals, particularly in the context of psychiatric training. He was awarded a Wellcome Clinician Short-Term Fellowship, which was held at the University of Glasgow Centre for History of Medicine for 4 months in late 2009 studying the history of Scottish Inebriate Reformatories,with mainly women being sent for ”reform”. This work has continued - along with other strands-in the form of M.D. research, 2010-2018.M.D. awarded 2018
Craig Stafford, University of Liverpool Staffordshire University, School of Law, Policing and Forensics
Craig Stafford gained his PhD from University of Liverpool in 2019. His research interests include the policing of women for drunkenness in Victorian Lancashire. He currently teaches History at University of Liverpool and Staffordshire University.
Cristiana Vale Pires, Catholic University of Portugal
Cristiana Vale Pires graduated in psychology and holds an MSc and PhD in Anthropology. Currently, she is a lecturer and PostDoc researcher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the Catholic University of Portugal. She is a founding member of the NGO Kosmicare (harm reduction targeting people who use drugs in nightlife and other recreational environments) and manager of the European project Sexism Free Night analysing and responding to the intersections between drug use in nightlife environments and sexualized violence.
Together with other members of the Women and Alcohol Research Cluster, we will present a panel of research entitled Shameless? Pleasure and Lust in Representations of Female Drinking in 19th Century Europe (Sunday 14th November 15.00-17.00).
Panel overview
Since its establishment in 2020, the women and alcohol research cluster has been bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to consider why gender matters when it comes to drinking. This panel will propose practical ways to take the step from multi-disciplinary to interdisciplinary approaches and from linguistic silos to more ambitious cross-cultural research.
Bringing together two historians and two literary scholars with examples from five European cultures, the panel will reflect on the latest developments in interdisciplinarity in drinking studies. By developing on the lively dialogue between disciplines characteristic of drinking studies as a research area, our work exemplifies the readiness of drinking studies to take the next step by sharing and mixing methodologies between disciplines.
By focusing on examples of female alcohol consumption in German, English, Polish, Russian, and Swiss fiction and press, the panel aims to establish transnational as well as transdisciplinary perspectives. The themes addressed will include public and (pseudo-)medical discourses on female drinking, gendered accounts of drinking habits and places, body politics, religious discourses, and social norms.
1. Dorota Dias-Lewandowska and Pam Lock, ‘“I did all my drinking—not being ashamed of it—at the public table”: Challenging cultural and linguistic boundaries to re-frame approaches to female drinking’
This paper will present the early findings from our NCN funded project on ‘Hidden representations of women’s drinking in Polish and British public discourses in the second half of the 19th century’. We will showcase how this project was developed to answer two specific challenges in drinking studies and to experiment with new methodologies to address them. The first relates specifically to the study of women and alcohol in the nineteenth century. Until recently, the focus has been on excessive drinking and sobriety. Recent research by Jen Wallis and David Beckingham on secret female drinking and by Paul Jennings and Thora Hands on ‘normal’ female drinking demonstrates that it is time to nuance this often binary approach. The second is a more general challenge in the humanities; the isolation of research into linguistic silos. We will share how this project will compare female drinking practices in Polish and British cultures using modern discourse analysis software. Given the nature of our sources, which are likely to be short and sometimes coded, this approach is ideal for both the material and the linguistic challenge we aim to mitigate. We will introduce you to a selection of examples from our new database: the ordinary women who warm their beer at the end of a working day, or sip their wine with friends; the women who have until now been hidden by the monstrous shadows of the ‘mother of destruction’ and the ‘angel of the house’.
2. Vanessa Höving, ‘With Pleasure. Female Drinking and Narratological Lust for Misery in Gotthelf’s Alcohol Literature’
Under the pseudonym Jeremias Gotthelf, Protestant minister Albert Bitzius (1797-1854) entered the German-speaking literary canon. Predominantly set in peasant Switzerland, his novels and stories denote Gotthelf as a regional writer whose sociocritical, didactical, and pedagogical approach is also articulated in numerous calendar and journal publications. Some of Gotthelf’s early texts deal with the so-called ‘spirits misery’ among rural populations. Posing as milieu-studies of drinking behaviours, perils and downfalls, these texts are read as lucid warnings even by contemporary physicians. Diverting from this line of reception, my paper focuses on narratological settings and their connection to public enlightenment and didactics. The well-established religious discourse and the specifically gendered approach of Gotthelf’s texts concern both female body politics and the Swiss nation’s body, linking female drinking to national wellbeing or demise. However, my paper argues that such representations of female drinking disguise a voyeuristic interest in alcohol-induced sexuality including a narratological lust for female misery and death. I will explore how this setting reflects on an obscene underside of popular enlightenment and didactics, and how Gothelf’s texts accentuate the role of alcohol as a factor of 'Produktionsästhetik' ['aesthetics of production'].
3. Mareen Heying, ‘Pleasure and morality. The female “drunkard” in late 19th century Germany fiction and art’
To better understand female alcohol consumption, historians need to question what, when, where and with whom women drank and how the consumption of alcohol has been gendered. To do so, traditional ‘historical’ documents are not sufficient and it is therefore imperative to consider additional sources, such as literature and art, to examine the social reality of female drinking. In this paper, I will take an interdisciplinary approach and consider three examples from German literature and art. The first two are literary examples that address private (female) drinking in moral terms: ‘The satire Die fromme Helene’ by Wilhelm Busch (1872), in which Busch shows religious and bourgeoise hypocrisy by portraying a bourgeoise woman who excessively turns to alcohol and later drunkenly kills herself in a fire; and Gerhart Hauptmann’s social drama Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889) in which the downfall of a family of farmers due to alcohol abuse is put upon stage. In contrast, the artist Heinrich Zille– known for his depictions of people from the working class and their daily struggles –made several drawings showing women publicly drinking and having fun in pubs without putting his subjects to shame. Taken together the sources show how female drinking in the late 19th century was regarded as shameful in Germany and how women nonetheless consumed alcohol shamelessly. I will show how female drinking spaces and social norms on female drinking can be better analyzed by considering historical sources with examples from literature and art.
4. Anna Smelova, “Non-Women’s Business”: Gender, Alcohol, and the Control of Sexuality in the Temperance Movement in Late Imperial Russia
The 19th century witnessed the rise of various reformist movements at both international and local levels, such as clean-living crusades, public health campaigns, and temperance activism. Anti-alcoholic activities in the United States and European countries influenced ‘the invention’ of alcoholism as a social problem in the Russian empire. Orthodox priests and doctors played a leading role in the anti-alcohol campaign in Russia, promoting their ideas about family, order, and morality.
This paper seeks to analyze the gender roles and participation of women in the Russian temperance movement. I will specifically focus on the First All-Russian Anti-Alcohol Congress (1910) case study, which created a rare opportunity for a woman in late imperial Russia to speak out on socially and politically important issues. One of the most influential activists was Evgenia Chebysheva-Dmitrieva — a feminist and head of the Society for Combating Alcoholism of Women and Children. Like female activists abroad, Chebysheva-Dmitrieva sought to draw attention to women's issues and increase the voice and role of women in the Russian public sphere. This paper argues that the discourse on sobriety was politicized in late imperial society and served as a platform for various social groups to pursue their views and interests. Additionally, although the role of women in daily life was recognized and male drunkenness was widely condemned by most temperance activists, raising the topic of granting or expanding rights was a rare occurrence in the male-oriented temperance rhetoric under the old regime.
Drinking Studies Network Conference 2021
Where are we now? The DSN at 10
Friday 12th November
Followed by a ‘Make your own’ Drinks’ Reception and Demonstration
Annemarie McAllister and Anistatia Miller
Saturday 13th November
09:45 – 10:00: Introductory Remarks
Mark Hailwood, Pam Lock, and Deborah Toner
10:00 – 12:00: Drinking Places Research Cluster: Which Way to The Pub? Chair: Paul Jennings
Drinking Places Research, 2010-2021
James Brown and James Kneale
The Moon Under Water Revisited: Orwell, war and the imaginary pub
Phil Mellows
‘To the Industrial Zone!’: An Autoethnography of Craft Beer Spaces in a Pandemic
Sam Goodman
Recent work on contemporary pubs: a review and discussion
Claire Markham
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch
13:00 – 14:30: Brewers and Drinkers Chair: Dan Malleck
Minority women and informal labour: The study of the ongoing alcohol brewings in Manipur
Lyna H. Misao
14:30 – 15:00: Break
15.00 – 17.00: Time and Temporalities Research Cluster: Time at the Bar Chair: James Kneale
Introduction to the Cluster
Steven Earnshaw
Calling Time on E.P. Thompson
Mark Hailwood
How Old is a Merry Drinker?
Steven Earnshaw
Family time: alcohol, family stories and the Intergenerational Self
Laura Fenton
17:00 – 19:00: Dinner Time
19:00 – 20:00: Online Social Virtual Drinking Workshop Susan Boyle
Meet the Craft & Artisanal Cluster! Launch event
Feminist Ferment: Craft brewers and gendered environments in the United States
Delorean Wiley and Colleen C. Myles
Young people's drinking choices in the Italian night settings: spaces and tactics
Franca Beccaria
Sunday 14th November
The role of different health behaviours in the decline in youth drinking
Abigail Stevely
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch
13:00 – 14:30: Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity Chair: Tyler Rainford
Alcohol, Slavery and Race in Brazil during the Long Nineteenth Century
Lucas Brunozi Avelar and Deborah Toner
The Golden Age of the American Cocktail and the German Diaspora
Anistatia Miller
14:30 – 15:00: Break
Pleasure and morality: The female ‘drunkard’ in late 19th century Germany fiction and art
Mareen Heying
17:00 – 17:30: Concluding Remarks
