Alcohol consumption and the production of gender binarism: a more-than-human perspective

This paper explores the complex interactions between gender and alcohol consumption. Drawing on more-than-human feminist materialist theories of gender, it diverges radically from the humanist, essentialist and practice-focused approaches underpinning much of the previous literature, suggesting instead that alcohol consumption contributes to the male/female gender binary. The paper analyses data on women’s alcohol consumption using a relational, post-anthropocentric and monist ontology that explores the material assemblages surrounding drinking occasions, while also acknowledging the capacities of non-human matter, including alcohol, to affect what human bodies can do. Data comprises 41 narrative interviews addressing drinking practices and daily routines of 21 English working mothers, up to three years after giving birth. We present cartographic representations of three complex, more-than-human drinking assemblages, comprising human bodies, alcohol, other non-human matter, places and spaces. We then document the physical, sociocultural, psychological and economic affects of alcohol on human subjects. By assessing these micropolitics of alcohol consumption, what capacities were privileged or suppressed and what possibilities or constraints on actions were established, we make sense of how alcohol can contribute to the aggregation of human bodies into socially defined categories, including a female/male gender binary.