‘Serious public mischief’: young women, alcohol and the New Zealand press

Abstract

This paper examines media discourses of women’s practices of alcohol use in New Zealand at two intervals over a 13- year period. It identifies six subject positions that young women and socially authoritative discursive agents are encouraged to engage with located within three discursive formations. These positions are: an active consumer, a passive consumer, a bad girl, an ignorant victim, a careless consumer and a risk actor. An examination of the relationships between these subject positions and the limits and the possibilities they entail for those engaging with them can enhance understanding of the ways young women enact drinking practices in contemporary cultures of intoxication, where femininities are said to have become impossible.