This article is based on 28 in-depth interviews with young women (18–25) about their experiences with intoxicated sexual encounters in Danish nightlife. Little research has examined the role intoxication plays in the processes of consensual and non-consensual sex. Using theories of intoxication and sexual scripts, this article focuses on how alcohol is used and perceived by these young women as a potential way of modifying behaviours and norms in their sexual encounters; how they characterize sexual consent and how they navigate intoxicated behaviour that can result in inappropriate, transgressive or victimizing situations. While the women talk about pleasurable and regrettable experiences, many described situations took on a much more ambiguous, fluid and nuanced role. The study points to the lack of knowledge on how ambiguity may play an active role in managing processes of sexual consent in intoxicated settings, especially for the youngest age groups. 

Social research on alcohol and sexual encounters has tended to be siloed into several different research endeavors, each addressing separate aspects of wanted and unwanted sexual encounters. While sociologists have focused on the patterns of social interaction, status competition, and emotional hierarchies of sexual encounters, they have left the role of alcohol intoxication largely unexamined. Conversely, the two dominant approaches to sexual encounters within alcohol research, the theories of alcohol myopia and alcohol expectancy, while focusing on alcohol have tended to take little account of the socio-relational dynamics and gendered meanings involved in those encounters. Our aim in this theoretical paper is to begin to bring together some of the concepts from these different research strands in examining how the social processes of intoxication potentially impact heteronormative sexual scripts and hence notions of femininity and masculinity among cisgender, heterosexual women and men. Our discussion is focused on the concepts of ritual and scripts; power, status, and hierarchies; and socio-spatial contexts, which are central to an understanding of the gendered and embodied social practices that take place within intoxicated sexual events; the emotional nature of the socio-spatial contexts within which they occur; and the socio-structural conditions that frame these events.

Social concern about sexual practices and sexual consent among young adults has increased significantly in recent years, and intoxication has often played a key role in such debates. While many studies have long suggested that alcohol plays a role in facilitating (casual) sexual encounters, intoxication has largely either been conceptualized as a risk factor, or researchers have focused on the pharmacological effects of alcohol on behaviors associated with sexual interaction and consent. To date little work has explored how young adults define and negotiate acceptable and unacceptable levels of intoxication during sexual encounters, nor the ways in which different levels of intoxication influence gendered sexual scripts and meanings of consent. This paper explores the latter two research questions using data from 145 in-depth, qualitative interviews with cisgender, heterosexual young adults ages 18–25 in the San Francisco Bay Area. In examining these interview data, by exploring the relationship between intoxication and sexual consent, and the ways in which gender plays out in notions of acceptable and unacceptable intoxicated sexual encounters, we highlight how different levels of intoxication signal different sexual scripts. Narratives about sexual encounters at low levels of intoxication highlighted the role of intoxication in achieving sexual sociability, but they also relied on the notion that intoxicated consent was dependent on the social relationship between the partners outside drinking contexts. Narratives about sexual encounters in heavy drinking situations were more explicitly gendered, often in keeping with traditionally gendered sexual scripts. In general we found that when men discussed their own levels of intoxication, their narratives were more focused on sexual performance and low status sex partners, while women’s and some men’s narratives about women’s levels of intoxication were focused on women’s consent, safety, and respectability. Finally, some participants rely on “consent as a contract” and “intoxication parity”—the idea that potential sexual partners should be equally intoxicated—to handle relations of power in interpersonal sexual scripts. Since these notions are sometimes deployed strategically, we suggest that they may serve to “black-box” gendered inequalities in power between the parties involved.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing on an analysis of the media debate on two Swedish rape cases involving alcohol, the present article argues that social norms and power structures are made visible both when debaters ascribe explanatory power to alcohol and when they do not. Using feminist intersectional theory, we argue that when debaters employ the concepts of “foreign culture” and “jet-set drinking culture,” respectively, to explain the rapes, they simultaneously (re)produce stereotypical discourses on gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity/nationality. The troublesome positions of the Immigrant, the Drink Slut and the Brat symbolize how these discourses intersect in the specific cases. To understand why alcohol is central in explaining rape in a fashionable area, but not in a socially disadvantaged area, we suggest that the official image of Sweden as a gender-equal, sexually liberal and multicultural society with small class differences blocks discussion of existing inequalities within the country. When rape happens in a place constructed as a “Swedish middle- and upper-class area,” alcohol and intoxication are used to symbolize the “uncivilized,” unpleasant and malicious among Swedish men. When rape happens in “socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods” populated by “immigrants,” the unpleasant instead resides in the “foreign culture.”

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of Swedish newspaper debates in 1979 and 1995, this article examines how Swedish newspapers refer to biological sex difference as central to drinking practices. The study shows that women are a special category of concern in debate about gender and drinking in both 1979 and 1995. Further, it shows that Swedish newspapers draw upon biology in different ways in the two years. In 1979, debate about drinking during pregnancy and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is central and newspapers link biomedical research on FAS to the moral idea that mothers do anything to avoid harm to children. In 1995, debate about girls' drinking habits is central and newspapers link sex hormones and neurotransmitters to the moral idea that girls shouldn't “drink like men.” These differences are discussed in the context of Swedish media interest in evolutionary psychology and biomedical solutions to alcohol problems during the 1990s.

The dominant approach to gender in alcohol research still conceives of gender in terms of binary roles and looks for explanations for gender differences in drinking. This paper challenges the binary approach, and instead analyzes the categorization of gender as created in Swedish newspaper stories about alcohol, published between 2000 and 2008. Specific categories examined include 'responsible mothers', 'responsible parents', 'party girls', 'career women with drinking problems', 'violent men who drink' and 'beer-drinking, sexist male athletes'. Based on this examination, the paper discusses how the media stories do and/or undo gender and how they encourage readers to act by the categories of drinkers that they describe. The study shows that the Swedish media stories produce multiple ways of interpreting drinking. Some of the stories undo gender through linking 'male' behavior (drinking heavily) to female bodies, while others undo gender by treating parenthood as more important than gender. Importantly, however, other stories reproduce the discourse of heteronormativity and gender binarism. The study suggests that analyses of media texts need to take the complexity of 'undoing gender' into account, for example by avoiding the assumption that gender is either undone or reproduced.

Texts are language excerpts produced from specific points of view; they communicate specific worldviews and values. This implies that social science research on power in texts can benefit from an analysis of the perspective from which a story is presented. Nevertheless, discussion of concrete tools for doing this at the level of practical analysis is less common. This article describes a set of tools for analyzing positioning at two different levels: the level of enunciation - which focuses on narrator and audience positions - and the level of utterance - which focuses on positions in stories. Moreover, addressing readers less familiar with discourse analysis and students new to discourse analysis, the article argues that combining tools for analyzing positioning with more general tools for analyzing meaning is advantageous because this allows for more detailed analysis of social power in texts and for more detailed description of the analytical process.

In this article, it is suggested that an important cultural image of intoxication in some Western societies appears to be 'intoxication as ecstasy', intoxication as escape from the everyday into a 'wild' and 'natural' state. The purpose of this article is to discuss this cultural image and its link to gendered ideas about sexuality and, on the basis of this discussion, to develop a hypothesis for further testing. The hypothesis developed proposes that women - via the cultural linking of their sexuality to biological processes of reproduction - are placed closer to nature than men. This makes women's drinking and intoxication seem more dangerous than men's, because drinking and intoxication would seem to make women come even closer to nature. It is suggested that women's 'dual licentiousness' threatens the distinction between nature and culture.

This study examines young people's discussions about alcohol in an Internet chat room. I study how alcohol is meaningful to the young people through specifically focusing their understandings of the concepts control/loss of control, conscientiousness and maturity. I also study what relations of power are constructed among them. The results point to four different lines of reasoning about alcohol: the 'teetotaller argument', the 'age-distinction argument', the 'moderate drinking argument' and the 'getting drunk argument'. From each of these lines of reasoning to the next, there is a shift in the definition of 'the Others' - of those who are said to be immature. In three of the lines of reasoning - the teetotaller argument, the moderate drinking argument and the getting drunk argument - the young people describe the characteristics of what for them appears as an ideal person with ideal views on alcohol consumption and intoxication: the strong person, the competent drinker and the authentic person. In the concluding section of the paper, I discuss and compare these different lines of reasoning with each other and with previous research on young people and drinking.