Youthful Drinking with a Purpose

Abstract

Drawing on a study consisting of 28 focus groups, this paper will discuss how drinking practices and partying is drawn into negotiations of gender and age identity. The article focuses on how boys and girls, aged 14–16, construct identities based on the discourses on alcohol and partying that can be identifed in the focus group data material. The focus group material forms a unique insight into how alcohol and partying are used in these negotiations. Together with Judith Butler's concepts of performance and citation, the concept of intersectionality will form a theoretical background for the discussion of how alcohol is used to perform age and sex in a culturally intelligible way. The girls position themselves as feminine and mature through their drinking and through sexualizing older boys. The “heterosexualizing” of the party-space creates a paradoxical position for the boys of the same age as the girls. They have limited possibility of making impressions on girls their own age, and they cannot turn towards younger girls because that will position them as immature. The intersection of age and sex creates a separation within the party scene, where girls and boys of the same age often attend different parties. The boys end up in same-sex parties where they construct masculinity by way of binge drinking more than in their gender play with the girls.