University College Dublin, Ireland - 19-20 June 2025
Women’s pleasure has traditionally been treated as something to be contained or subjugated to responsibilities within the home and to the larger society. As such, it is often considered dangerous, to family, to community, to nation. Across the world, the disruptive potential and threat of women’s pleasure is often intertwined with alcohol. Against this background, the medicalisation of alcohol consumption further impacted societal attitudes towards women’s drinking in particular and often limiting terms. In some countries, legislation or more informal legal interventions by police, were also gendered and further policed women’s pleasures.
For this conference, co-organised by the “Drinking Cultures” project (Wellcome Trust, UCD) and the Drinking Studies Network “Women and Alcohol” cluster, we invite speakers to consider the perceived dangers of women’s drinking and drunkenness but also the pleasures associated with it. What counts as ‘dangerous’ shifts over time but constructions of harmful pleasure are usually gendered in ways that are culturally and historically specific. From the moral panic of the ruined mothers of eighteenth-century England’s gin craze to the green fairy of fin de siècle France and the ‘Shebeen Queens’ of twentieth-century South Africa, women have often been the symbolic face of society’s fears about alcohol.
We welcome proposals for traditional papers on the topics suggested below but also in innovative formats and on subjects that speak to the theme more broadly:
- Joy and pleasure
- Alcohol and affect
- Women’s abstinence, no-lo, sober-curious
- Poly substance use, abuse and addiction
- Domestic medicine, professional medicine and medicalised bodies
- Changing habits - cultural, individual, historical perspectives
- Legal and illegal drinking cultures
- Cultural attitudes towards different forms of consumption
- Drinking, drunkenness and risk-taking
- Understanding harm
- Taste, fashion and connoisseurship
- Drinking spaces & places
- Local and global perspectives
- Cross cultural comparative approaches
- Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches
Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a short bio to dsnwomencluster@gmail.com by 13 January 2025
