Gendering of Alcohol and Transgressive Selves

The chapter draws on the transgressive scripts and Western and non-Western gender theories to analyse young men’s and women’s drinking masculinities and femininities. Men presented multilayered reasons for women to enact abstinence and sobriety, while a few noted that if women must consume alcohol, they should be restricted to wine and other so-called women’s drinks because drinking beer is unfeminine, and alcohol will damage their fragile feminine selves. In men’s networks, constructing abstinence was seen as unmasculine and attracted sanctions. Therefore, they embodied excessive drinking to perform and (re)produce hegemonic masculinity and gain social badges and advantages. Because of the sociocultural constraints on women’s drinking, some enacted emphasised femininity while others contested norms and social practices that subordinate women and encourage inequalities. These women shared nuanced accounts of the extent to which gender double standards harm not only femininity but also masculinity. To resist passivity and prove to their peers that they possessed recognisable agency, some young women enacted ‘protest femininity’, consuming alcohol excessively. In contrast, others enacted agential alternative drinking femininity, which was neither passive nor boisterous. The chapter highlights inherent colonial legacies regarding gender that promote heteropatriarchy, drive contemporary gendered drinking practices, and shaped how participants enacted overlapping conformity and transgression. Young people’s nuanced gendered excessive drinking practices highlighted the importance of not assuming that, globally, youth drinking is declining.