Masculinities, femininities and the geographies of public and private drinking landscapes

Geographers have been slow to address issues about abstinence, drinking and drunkenness, but the importance of alcohol on the social and political agenda has underpinned recent growth in this field. Explorations of the gendered geographies of drinking are one important strand in this emerging field, but there is currently a paucity of research on women and gender (as opposed to men), and a dearth of research which looks beyond a rather narrowly specified range of public drinking environments. This paper addressed these short-comings through a quantitative and qualitative examination of different men's and women's alcohol consumption in private as well as diverse public drinking environments in 21st Century Britain. The paper emphasises the importance of gendered moralities in shaping gender and intra-gender differences in drinking levels, locations and motivations, and explores the connections between apparently separate public and private drinking environments. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.