‘You’re repulsive’: Limits to acceptable drunken comportment for young adults
Section snippets
1 Introduction
The past decade has seen a burgeoning literature on the imperatives many young people feel to seek alterity through alcohol and other substance use (Griffin, Bengry-Howell, Hackley, Mistral, & Szmigin, 2009; Pennay and Moore, 2010, Pennay, 2012). Researchers have described a culture of intoxication among young people that is constituted though the night time economy and alcohol promotions, arguing that heavy alcohol and drug use has become normalised (Measham & Brain, 2005). This literature
2 Method
The analysis here draws on qualitative interviews conducted in 2012 with 60 people living in Melbourne aged 18–24 who had consumed at least one alcoholic drink within the previous six months. The study was designed to provide insights into subcultures and practices that frame young adults’ alcohol consumption. Ethical approval was obtained from two universities (see Acknowledgements).
Equal numbers of women and men were recruited via advertisements placed at local tertiary education
3 Practices, gendering, settings and relationships of drunken comportment
In organising the data, we were informed by the work of Mol (2012), who argues that the body is not a coherent and consistent entity, retaining its integrity as it moves through the world. Rather, the body emerges in different guises according to the ‘settings, practices, situations’ where it is located. With this in mind, we identified four interrelated domains where drunken bodies became distasteful (to young adults themselves, as well as to others around them), generating feelings of
4 Discussion: domains of drunken comportment
When MacAndrew and Edgerton (1969) described the behaviours that are ‘within-limits’ as acceptable performances of drunkenness, they depicted rules about drinking behaviour as varying between cultures, but relatively fixed within them. In contrast, contemporary theorisation of deviance and stigma finds the boundaries on what kinds of behaviour attract social censure to be porous, unclear and dynamic (Dotter, 2015). In the context of a culture of intoxication where extravagant, even
Conflict of interest
None.
Acknowledgements
The authors report no conflict of interest. The Centre for Alcohol Policy Research receives core funding from the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education. The Australian Research Council [LP 100100017], VicHealth and the Victorian Department of Health funded this research and David Moore provided guidance in relation to the study. Amy Pennay is supported by a fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council [GNT1069907]. Mutsumi Karasaki and Christine Siokou conducted some
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