Aim: In recent decades, the notion of addiction as a brain disease has become influential among scientists, public institutions, and addiction treatment professionals, and its popularity raises the question of how biomedical science affects public perceptions of illness. Although existing research has examined how laypeople interpret disease models of addiction, few studies address how they interpret the brain disease model as presented by the media, the version that most citizens are likely to encounter in their everyday lives. This article contributes to existing research by examining Swedish laypeople’s interpretations of a news article presenting biomedical research on addiction and analyzing how trust intervenes in their interpretations. Methods: Drawing on an audience study design with qualitative interviews, the participants were asked to read and discuss a newspaper article that explained how alcohol, amphetamine, and nicotine affect the brain. Results: The analysis shows that their interpretations depended on how they perceived their own ability to assess the science portrayed in the article. The participants trust doctors and scientists but doubt their own ability to assess the science, and trust is therefore provisional or pending until this situation changes. In addition, trust requires that the participants are able to recognize and identify with the contents of the news article. Conclusion: This pattern can be understood as a way of dealing with the contradictory expectations laypeople face–they are expected to trust scientific knowledge and to evaluate knowledge claims rationally, but they do not have access to the knowledge that would, supposedly, enable them to do so.

Bogren offers an outline of the complex and shifting gendered meanings attributed to young adults’ drinking and drunkenness in the period between the 1990s and the present. Focusing on the shifts in meaning brought about by consumer society, postfeminism, and health risk approaches to alcohol, the chapter identifies four key discourses of young adults’ alcohol consumption. Bogren examines these discourses in relation to femininity and masculinity among young adults, using research on the Swedish media as illustrative examples. As well as looking into problematizing and celebratory discourses of drinking, Bogren also draws attention to the relation between drinking, gender, and class. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the tensions and contradictions involved in future research on alcohol, femininity, and masculinity among young adults.

Background: Existing research indicates that sexual behaviour and aggression are particularly important to the reproduction of gendered drinking norms, both in the media and in face-to-face interaction. However, research has yet to understand in more detail the discursive processes whereby actors negotiate gendered norms related to alcohol, sexual behaviour, and aggression. This article examines how actors make symbolic distinctions between themselves and others in discussing alcohol, aggression, and sexual desire, and analyses the similarities and differences within and across gender that they identify in this process. Methods: The study relies on individual qualitative interviews with 25 Swedish women and men. To elicit participants’ normative positions, we used a newspaper article as a probe during the interviews. Results: Findings show that participants highlight similarities between women and men, and variation and individual differences among men and among women in discussing alcohol's effects on sexual desire and ‘sexually active behaviour’. Differences, by contrast, are most salient when they discuss alcohol and aggression and seek to distance themselves from ‘shabby bar men’, rural men, and male football hooligans who drink and fight, outgroups that are marked as working-class in the participants’ narratives. Conclusion: Two general discursive patterns were identified: discursive bridging across gender and discursive othering across class. For the participants, drinking norms are not as much about general gender differences as they are about the ‘dysfunctional’ drinking of certain groups of working-class men. These findings contribute to a more specific understanding of the reconstitution of gender boundaries in relation to drinking norms.

The media has a central role in communicating and constructing health knowledge, including commu-nicating research findings related to alcohol consumption. However, research on news reporting aboutalcohol is still a relatively small field; in particular, there are few studies of the reporting of biomedicalalcohol and drug research, despite the assumed increasing popularity of biomedical perspectives inpublic discourse in general. The present article addresses the representational‘devices’used in Swedishpress reporting about biomedical alcohol research, drawing on qualitative thematic analysis of thetopics, metaphors, and optimist versus critical frames used in presenting biomedical research findings.In general, the press discourse focuses on genetic factors related to alcohol problems, on the role ofthe brain and the reward system in addiction, and on medication for treating alcohol problems.Metaphors of‘reconstruction’and‘reprograming’of the reward system are used to describe howthe brain’s function is altered in addiction, whereas metaphors of‘undeserved reward’and‘shortcuts’to pleasure are used to describe alcohol’s effects on the brain. The study indicates that aspects ofthe Swedish press discourse of biomedical alcohol research invite reductionism, but that thisresult could be understood from the point of view of both the social organization of reporting and theintersection of reporting, science, and everyday understandings rather than from the point of viewof the news articles only. Moreover, some characteristics of the media portrayals leave room for inter-pretation, calling for research on the meanings ascribed to metaphors of addiction in everydayinteraction.

Based on a summary and discussion of our previous studies of media portrayals of gender and alcohol in relation to the general, societal discourses of risk and pleasure, we aim to develop the gender theoretical understanding of alcohol as a health issue. We argue that even though the media provide various implicit or explicit instructions for women on how to act, both warnings and encouragements to drink are framed within basic gendered assumptions that concern women's dealing with alcohol. Because of this, the discourses that construct women's drinking as either risky or pleasurable are in fact not separate, but rather two sides of the same coin. Drawing on this analysis, we argue that much of the research on alcohol consumption and sex difference - and in particular on women's drinking - lacks in its understanding of the gendered ideas and assumptions that frame and influence these practices.

De senaste 20-30 åren kännetecknas av samhällsomvandlingar som framväxten av ett konsumtionssamhälle, den tredje vågens feminism och ett hälsopolitiskt intresse för riskgrupper. Här diskuteras några av dessa i relation till svensk alkoholkultur, med särskilt fokus på forskning om ungdomar, genus och sexualitet. Sammanfattningsvis visar forskningen att normer och meningsskapande kring alkohol varierar bland olika grupper kvinnor och män (t.ex. utifrån ålder och sexualitet). Samtidigt existerar föreställningen att det är mer problematiskt för kvinnor att dricka sida vid sida med föreställningen att kvinnor idag ”dricker som män” och föreställningen om alkoholkonsumtion som ett kvinnligt frigörelse- och valfrihetsprojekt. Även maskulinitetsskapande tycks äga rum i spänningsfältet mellan ett ”grabbigt” ideal där alkohol associeras med ”tuffhet” och ideal som betonar faderskap, kreativitet och svaghet.

Purpose: A growing body of social research analyzes how the biomedical interest in detailed molecular aspects of people's bodies (genes, biomarkers, DNA) affect everyday notions of health, risk, and responsibility for health problems. However, this research focus has been largely neglected in social alcohol research. The purpose of this paper is to report on some early findings from a study of media portrayals of biomedical alcohol research and to present a rationale for studying biomedical alcohol research more broadly. Design/methodology/approach: The empirical discussion is based on textual analysis of 90 newspaper articles published in Swedish newspapers between 1995 and 2010 and one-on-one semi-structured interviews with 24 newspaper readers about their interpretation of the newspaper portrayals. The motives for studying biomedical alcohol research more broadly are discussed in relation to existing research and theories of biomedicalization. Findings: It is found that a large majority of the newspapers cite biomedical researchers to explain the mechanisms of addiction, and that biomedical research is often presented as revolutionary in scope. However, journalists also act as storytellers who explain the biomedical research results to readers. The reward system proved to be a central notion among the interviewees, who had their own, different and varying definitions of the concept. The authors suggest a framework for analyzing how biomedical knowledge is produced, communicated and utilized by three types of key actors. Originality/value: The study presents a novel framework for studying biomedical alcohol research.

Psychotropics and alcohol are psychoactive substances with different cultural meanings and opposing gender associations. This paper examines the Swedish press debate on gender and psychotropics and compares it with the press debate on gender and alcohol, aiming to identify the conditions under which gendered moral boundaries of acceptable/unacceptable consumption are defended. The study shows that boundaries acquire a heightened moral status in news stories (1) that deal with a topic related to cultural ideas about essential gender difference, (2) where the cultural status of the psychoactive substance is linked to selfish and/or hedonistic motives, and (3) where innocent victims of consumption can be identified. Moreover, it shows that the "bad" characters constructed through this moral boundary are portrayed as exhibiting "excessive masculinity" and "insufficient femininity". On the basis of these findings, it is argued that newspaper discourse on psychotropics and alcohol still relies quite heavily on gendered and heteronormative ideas.