https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0136-1962
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Abstract
Social research on alcohol and sexual encounters has tended to be siloed into several different research endeavors, each addressing separate aspects of wanted and unwanted sexual encounters. While sociologists have focused on the patterns of social interaction, status competition, and emotional hierarchies of sexual encounters, they have left the role of alcohol intoxication largely unexamined. Conversely, the two dominant approaches to sexual encounters within alcohol research, the theories of alcohol myopia and alcohol expectancy, while focusing on alcohol have tended to take little account of the socio-relational dynamics and gendered meanings involved in those encounters. Our aim in this theoretical paper is to begin to bring together some of the concepts from these different research strands in examining how the social processes of intoxication potentially impact heteronormative sexual scripts and hence notions of femininity and masculinity among cisgender, heterosexual women and men. Our discussion is focused on the concepts of ritual and scripts; power, status, and hierarchies; and socio-spatial contexts, which are central to an understanding of the gendered and embodied social practices that take place within intoxicated sexual events; the emotional nature of the socio-spatial contexts within which they occur; and the socio-structural conditions that frame these events.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 However, an examination of intoxicated sexual encounters among LGBTQ is an important task not only because these groups are at an elevated risk of sexual violence victimization, but also because alcohol has long played a central role for LGBTQ for example by facilitating exploration of sexuality and gender (Hunt et al., Citation2019; Pienaar et al., Citation2020; Race et al., Citationin press; Valentine & Skelton, Citation2003). Thus, research among LGBTQ has the potential to further enrich our understanding of the complexities of gender in intoxicated sexual encounters (Hunt & Antin, Citation2019).
2 Alcohol expectancy research sometimes references the literature on sexual scripts or incorporates the related notion of ’alcohol scripts’ (e.g., Bowleg et al., Citation2015; Davis et al., Citation2010; Tyler et al., Citation2017), often as shorthand for sexual scripts where alcohol plays a key role. Alcohol expectancies are then conceptualized as part of an individual’s internal, cognitive schemas of sexual behavior, and social interaction is understood as being guided by such expectancies and schemas (e.g., Bowleg et al., Citation2015; Davis et al., Citation2010).
3 In extending this approach, the typing of the setting according to hierarchies of age, social class, and sexuality will be equally important to address.
4 Except of course that in Marshall’s (Citation1983) text the drinker is unproblematically assumed to be male.