The thesis explores current debates ,around postfeminism and neoliberalism, and young women's articulations of femininity within the context of young women's excessive drinking practices. Alcohol plays a key ro le in UK culture today, and for young people, getting drunk is an accepted, expected and indeed normalised part of a night out in the current 'culture of intoxication'. It is also a space for enacting highly visible displays of gender, femininities and class, and one that represents an important 'space of attention' for exploring contemporary subjectivity. As such this space provides a productive source for carrying out in-depth analysis of how young women negotiate and manage 21st century femininities in the UK. Data is provided in the form of white working-class women's accounts of excessive drinking in various drinking venues within the county of Hampshire, England. Thirty-three women, aged between 18 and 24 years, took part in several phases of data collection, and these include individual interviews, friendship group discussions, and ethnographic methods. I employed a version of Foucauldian discourse analysis to identify key themes and discourses in the young women's talk, and note how young women use excessive alcohol for confidence within what has become a drinking culture of hyper-sexuality, where the emphasis is on the traditional male gaze, but also and possibly even more powerfully, the postfeminist female gaze. The young women draw on a number of discourses to construct drunkenness as a routine part of going out, and how the female gaze plays an important role in 'mirroring' and/or 'othering' women in terms of their feminine recognition. Furthermore, the women draw on postfeminist discourses to emphasise how painful and hard it is becoming a young female subject today.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:582796 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Mackiewicz, Alison |
| Contributors | Shankar, Avi ; Riley, Sarah |
| Publisher | University of Bath |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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