Domesticity to Autonomy: Women, Pre-Drinking, and the Liminoid Experience

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drinking before going out, also referred to as ‘pre-drinking’ or ‘pre-loading’, has received little academic attention in adult female populations. This comparative research analyses women’s pre-drinking routines by drawing on ethnographic data from a broader study of women’s wine drinking practices in Australia and England. Informed by Catherine Bell’s ‘ritualised activities’, and the work of Victor Turner on ‘liminoid’ experiences and ‘communitas’, it finds that pre-drinking is a dynamic, ritualised, liminoid experience, with distinct contextual variations. In both groups, pre-drinking acts as a ritual and liminoid event which signifies the cue from ‘domestic’ home roles to ‘free’ social times. However, it finds that for the English women, pre-drinking is typically performed as a solo routine involving construction of idealised gender roles through which self-presentation is performed. In doing so, it supports previous research that posits that women drink wine to feel decadent and sophisticated, as part of a gendered embodiment of femininity. In the case of the Australian women, pre-drinking typically manifests as a feeling of ‘sisterhood’ among friends in an expression of communitas.