‘The only time I feel girly is when I go out’: Drinking stories, teenage girls, and respectable femininities

Abstract

Over the past decade or so, there has been a growing concern in public and policy discourse that contemporary British young women are drinking in ever-greater quantities at an ever-younger age. This paper is based on a small-scale doctoral research into young women's smoking and drinking practice in a town in Southern England, and explores how teenage girls perform, negotiate and scrutinize legitimate generational drinking femininities. The article, using a feminist poststructuralist analysis, particularly focuses on the use of teenage girls' cultural and material practices, especially the use of stories and snapshots in enabling girls to navigate and negotiate shifting gendered alcohol discourses.