Sign of the times? Gender, sexuality, and drinking stories

Abstract

In a commentary, Radcliffe and Measham (2014) argue that the elations of gender, sexuality, and heteronormativity in Tutenges nd Sandberg (2013) article about the drinking stories of Danish outh remain underexplored. Tutenges and Sandberg (2014) reply hat they chose to study the stories in a folkloristic perspective, as ne of several analytical options available. I will not argue that Tutenges and Sandberg should have focused n gender and sexuality. There are no simple answers to what contitutes the most legitimate research focus, and choices will depend n the position and values of the researcher. However, in this disussion, it is important to realize that gender and sexuality can be onsidered as both thematic research fields with their own theories nd as social systems of power and privilege that cut across other esearch fields. If we draw on the second notion, a folkloristic perpective does not necessarily exclude gender and sexuality from he analysis. Furthermore, gender and sexuality seldom emerge as xplicitly in empirical materials as they do in the Danish drinking tories. It seems to me that the drinking stories are about the preentation of self; of adapting to the norms and demands of the ituation (Goffman, 1959). Does this mean that they represent the torytellers’ actual opinions about gender? No – there is no simple ne-to-one relationship between stories and storytellers’ opinions n other situations. But there are different types of tall story and ifferent ways of turning the world upside down, as “all real culures contain diverse, often conflicting symbols, rituals, stories, nd guides to action” (Swidler, 1986: p. 277). Whereas Goffman s renowned for his close analyses of social situations, he also cknowledged that situational interaction is structured by social orms related to wider cultural assumptions (Goffman, 1959). At least two common cultural presumptions about women’s rinking are relevant to our understanding of the stories. One is