‘We’re stuck in the corner’: Young women, embodiment and drinking in the countryside

Abstract

In this paper I extend our understanding of the ways in which young women in rural areas produce, negotiate and experience identity through an exploration of their drinking practices. Through a close ethnography of three groups of young women in the rural south west of England this paper shows how pubs, clubs, bedrooms and other informal spaces such as ‘in the park’ provide arenas of performance in which identities are constructed, negotiated and reproduced. In particular this paper explores the significance given by rural young women to their discursive drinking practices and the extent to which these practices lead to inclusionary and/or exclusionary experiences. Eschewing conventional notions of the body, by recognizing the body as malleable, porous and an unfinished product, subject to socially produced alteration, this paper teases apart the different lived experiences of rural young women by arguing that much of their behaviour in pub(lic) and private space(s) can be seen in terms of acts of spectacle, compliance and challenges to disciplinary frameworks. To illustrate this point I discuss how rural young women employ various embodied strategies to move between spaces to experiment with alcohol and alternative femininities and ‘do’ gender, thereby contesting acceptable rural gender roles and expectations. Through shedding light on drinking practices, I reveal how this experimentation affects their sense of their body, femininity and belonging in the countryside.

Notes

Notes

[1] Work on urban pubs is beginning to emerge in geographical writing, for example Kneale (1999, 2001) on the political economy and regulation of pub(lic) spaces and Latham (2003) on day- and night-time economies of formal urban drinking spaces.

[2] The legal age of consuming alcohol on a licensed premises in the United Kingdom is 18.

[3] Class positions and subjectivities are deliberately omitted from this analysis because, while access to disposable income has an effect on mobility, the intricacies and subtleties of identity formation that this paper considers cannot be reduced to blunt socioeconomic categories.

[4] Countryside Youth Project (CYP) is an organization funded by central and local government with the remit to provide a youth service in a rural development area.

[5] The landlords of the pubs in this study usually allow young people to drink in the pub between Monday and Thursday nights. As Annie stated, ‘When it's quiet John [landlord] lets us have a drink and when we’ve worked a night we sometimes stay behind and have pint before he runs us home’ (Personal diary).

[6] See Crang (1994) and Fonarow (1997) for a discussion on ‘front’ and ‘back’ stage performances.

[7] As the young women were also of mixed classes—some from wealthy backgrounds and some with more modest means—I have deliberately not discussed class here. It is a very blunt tool for analysis in this case, in part, because it defines young people by their parent's socioeconomic status and, in part, as it had no apparent influence on friendship groups.

[8] Similarly, research on sport suggests that women-as-objects stories are commonly and enthusiastically reproduced in locker-room talk (Sabo & Panepinto, 1990).

[9] Farmers who present animals in competitions at agricultural fairs or country shows.

[10] The Mosh pit is the front row or stage side of a gig. Activities such as diving from the stage on to others or being hoisted by friends and rolling on top of the crowd are quite common. There is a high degree of bodily activity including pogoing, slamming, moshing and the shaking of heads. Within this zone, according to Fonarow (1997, p. 361), ‘there are acute gender distinctions in terms of bodily distribution’—the mosh pit is usually the domain of young males between the ages of 14 and 21.