Youth nightlife at home: towards a feminist conceptualisation of home

ABSTRACT

This paper explores home as a space of youth nightlife and drinking through a feminist lens. It draws on feminist geographical scholarship on home and 40 semi-structured interviews with young people aged 16–25 in Switzerland in the context of a larger interdisciplinary study. We find that the home figures as a central space of nightlife for young people beyond pre-drinking or home parties. At the same time, privacy and intimacy are important to young people when drinking alcohol outside of the home. We suggest that this preference of privacy when going out indicates an interweaving of private and public spheres in young people’s nightlives. The paper argues that the home is both a central concrete space and an important symbolic notion in young people’s nightlives. In so doing, it empirically complicates the public/private dualism and contributes to feminist geographical conceptualisations of home in the context of youth nightlife.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• home
• nightlife
• feminist geography
• alcohol

Acknowledgements

In addition to the Swiss National Science Foundation and all Youth@Night and Dusk2Dawn research team members, we shall like to thank all colleagues at the University of Zurich’s Department of Geography who have given constructive feedback on this paper, in particular at the Human Geography research colloquium in winter 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The legal drinking age for beer and wine is 16 and 18 for harder alcohol including liquors in Switzerland It is legal to drink alcohol but punishable by law to sell and pass on beer and wine to persons below the age of 16 and liquors below the age of 18. Parents are excluded from this prohibition.

2 All translation by first author.

3 Jasmine Truong conducted the German-speaking interviews, Pauline Ndondo and Anna Katz the French-speaking interviews and the two research assistants Lucie Chambeyron and Valentine Guenin helped with the transcription of the material.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [grant numbers CR1I1_120181/1 and CRSII5_17369].