Abstract
Gender scholars often assume that alcohol misuse is representative of hegemonic masculinity, but women are simultaneously consuming rates and quantities that parallel those of men. To focus on the gender dynamics of alcohol misuse, the author interviewed 16 members of a metropolitan 12-step recovery community. The findings show how persistent marginalization and trauma contribute to two painful emotions, fear and anger, that influence doing gender through alcohol use. As women and men come to anticipate rejection or harm, they develop a fear of social interactions yet resist painful experiences in divergent ways. Women used alcohol (1) to carve out social mobility and status in spaces previously closed to them; (2) to manage social anxiety, fear, and anger rooted in trauma and marginalization; and (3) to challenge or reshape expectations of femininity by forming hybrid femininities of high expectations. Men used alcohol (1) to accept roles of low status; (2) to manage fear, anger, and emotional suppression tied to past trauma and marginalization; and (3) to construct hybrid masculinities of low expectations that resisted the hegemonic ideals they were socialized into. These findings challenge foundational gender research that links heavy consumption to hegemonic masculinity and inform alcohol research and public health policy.
Keywords
Since the 1970s, women have increasingly adopted traditionally masculine ways of drinking (Grucza et al. 2018; Keyes, Grant, and Hasin 2008; Lennox et al. 2018; Peralta 2007). Although drinking rates have substantially increased for women, men’s have not (Fortes 1974; White 2020). Some regions, for instance, find men consuming less frequently and at lower rates than women, especially during midlife (Keyes et al. 2019), while girls are consuming at similar rates to boys in the United States (Johnston et al. 2021). This shift is perplexing, as the liquor and beer industries theoretically promote alcohol consumption as a masculine act whereby women become dominated by, oppositional to, and sexualized for men (Messner and Montez de Oca 2005). This brings into question whether alcohol misuse reflects encultured domination of men over women or something else.
In this article, I distinguish between alcohol use, alcohol misuse, and alcohol use disorder (AUD) as points on a continuum, allowing me to trace how participants moved from casual or situational use into more harmful patterns. Alcohol use involves socially accepted consumption, including normalized drinking rituals. Alcohol misuse involves drinking patterns that may harm the drinker or others, increasing the risk for AUD. AUD is a clinically diagnosed condition marked by compulsive alcohol use, impaired control, and continued consumption despite significant negative consequences (American Psychiatric Association 2022). I use alcoholism only when participants use it to describe AUD.
With these distinctions in place, I turn to existing research on gender and alcohol use, which remains largely quantitative and may benefit from additional qualitative research capable of addressing how and why questions. Past work shows that stress, mental health (Di Florio, Craddock, and Van den Bree 2014; St. John, Montgomery, and Tyas 2009; Temmen and Crockett 2020), and complex gender roles and expectations for women effect alcohol use (Caluzzi et al. 2022). Yet we know less about the motivation(s) underpinning AUD, despite motivations, especially emotion, are central to explaining social action and, therefore, shaping effective public policy (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2024). Past qualitative scholarship often assumes that masculine drinking practices shaped by media and sport are fundamental to alcohol misuse, despite the absence of firsthand accounts (Messner and Montez de Oca 2005). Hearing from those with lived experience is vital to prevent AUD and sharpen research on shifting drinking patterns. Given limited qualitative research on how and why alcohol use rates are shifting by gender, I ask how women and men who identify as alcoholics understand alcohol use in relation to gender identity.
I answer this question using interviews with a 12-step recovery community in Canada. Drawing on gender, emotion, and social psychology, I show how fear and anger, emotions rarely explored in unison, mediate gendered alcohol use and gender identity formation. Empirically, I reveal how alcohol helped participants manage trauma, marginalization, and rigid gender scripts. Women used alcohol as a tool to manage painful emotions, navigate exclusive spaces, and develop hybrid femininities of high expectations, while men used it to retreat from hegemonic masculinity, cope with painful emotions, and forge hybrid masculine identities of low expectations. Theoretically, I argue that alcohol misuse is not inherently hegemonic; it can also act as a form of resistance to strict gender norms. As women rise through male-dominated fields, alcohol may function as a coping mechanism for status anxiety, while allowing women to carve out space for authentic self-expression. For men, alcohol may offer escape from painful ideals of masculine success and provide a role initially used to resist conformity. I argue the gender gap of alcohol misuse reflects divergent emotional and gendered meanings, not just consumption rates and quantities. Therefore, this research reframes gendered alcohol use as resistance through hybrid identities, not conformity to hegemony. Understanding these gendered motivations can help refine theories of alcohol use and inform public policy, particularly amid backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and the resurgence of restrictive gender norms.
Literature Review
Hegemonic masculinity and femininity
Hegemonic masculinity refers to a set of practices, shaped by historical and social contexts, that legitimate gender inequality between men and women and among men (Connell 1987). Cultural contexts foster patterned gender performances that privilege some masculinities and femininities over others. To be hegemonic, masculinity must legitimate patriarchal relations, as is the case in North America. This system is constructed in such a way to give the impression that women are “naturally” subordinated to men (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), such as dominant men consuming more and handling more alcohol than women and lesser men. This assumption has led some scholars to treat heavy alcohol use as inherently masculine, thus overlooking its varied meanings and motivations (Hunt and Antin 2019).
Four types of nonhegemonic masculinity are central to understanding gender dynamics as they relate to AUD: complicit, subordinate, marginalized, and hybrid. Complicit masculinities benefit from gender inequality while supporting hegemony, but are not themselves hegemonic. Subordinate masculinities are built from less powerful forms of masculinity, or deviant forms, such as effeminate men. Marginalized masculinities are discriminated against or trivialized because of unequal relations outside of those based in gender, such as class, race, ethnicity, and age (Messerschmidt 2019). Modernity, however, shows novel masculinities. Termed hybrid masculinities, these men push away from hegemonic masculinities, reducing importance of young, White, heterosexual men in comparison with marginalized or subordinated men, and work to change existing systems of power and inequality (Bridges and Pascoe 2014).
The superordinate form of femininity, or “hegemonic femininity,” consists of the womanly characteristics that establish and legitimate a hierarchical and complementary relationship to hegemonic masculinity and that, by doing so, guarantee masculine dominance and subordination of women (Schippers 2007:94). Hegemonic femininity relates to a powerful position in what Collins (1990) termed the matrix of domination. This status position garners some women considerable social benefit over other women, and some men (Hamilton et al. 2019). Recent scholarship points toward modern crafting of hybrid femininities that fuse elements of traditional gender performances in novel ways (Ispa-Landa and Oliver 2020). Given that gender is enacted and performed rather than innate, alcohol consumption may serve as a tool for doing gender (West and Fenstermaker 1995), much like alcohol’s link to sexuality (Peralta 2008).
Although much of the foundational works on gender, masculinity and alcohol draw from U.S. samples, cross-national studies suggest that dominant masculine ideals (e.g., control, stoicism, and risk-taking) are widely shared across Western contexts, including Canada and Australia (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; de Visser and Smith 2007; Mankowski and Smith 2016; Nordin, Degerstedt, and Granholm Valmari 2024; Peralta 2008; Shafer, Petts, and Scheibling 2021). Although local variations exist, the broader patterns of hegemonic masculinity and its ties to alcohol consumption are sufficiently similar to warrant theoretical expansion from U.S. and international literature to Canadian cases.
Alcohol Consumption and “Doing Gender”
Research consistently shows that the gender gap in alcohol consumption is narrowing, with men and women consuming alcohol at increasingly similar rates and quantities (Keyes et al. 2008; Raninen et al. 2024; Stelander et al. 2021; White 2020). For example, between 2008 and 2017 in Canada, the prevalence of acute-risk drinking declined by 10 percent among men but rose by 29 percent among women. Similarly, although chronic-risk alcohol misuse remained stable for men, it increased by 20 percent for women, with rates rising across all women 25 years and older (Health Canada 2013; Statistics Canada 2017). This story of a narrowing gender gap in alcohol misuse is sharpened when we consider occupational status, as both women and men who sought out high-status occupations also see increases in binge drinking (McKetta et al. 2021). Thus, those individuals who cope with stress through alcohol use (Cooper et al. 1995; Stets et al. 2024) may also use it as an element of gender performance and to climb status hierarchies.
“Doing gender” is a sociological perspective on gender that considers gender not as a stable characteristic, but an ever modifiable and renegotiated performance developed throughout interactions (West and Fenstermaker 1995). Once gender roles are established, people are expected to follow them and are judged on the basis of their assumed sex category (West and Zimmerman 1987). For example, women are increasingly socialized to take on leadership roles and adopt stereotypical masculine behavior while remaining subordinate to men (Abadi, Dirani, and Rezaei 2022; Berdahl et al. 2018; Nelson et al. 2023).
Examining how gender is performed through alcohol use builds on past research (cf. Messner and Montez de Oca 2005) and highlights how women and men may use alcohol as a tool to shape, challenge, or reinforce gender norms (Peralta and Jauk 2011:887). Men perform masculinity through heavy drinking rituals, while often forbidding women, prompting some women to drink as resistance (cf. Dumbili 2022). But drinking rituals and AUD are not the same. The former is a form of alcohol use, like those that persist on many college campuses (Crawford and Novak 2006; Iwamoto et al. 2011). The latter is the consequence of landing within collectives of heavy consumption while being predisposed to developing AUD, often from past traumas (Ullman et al. 2013) and persistent coping with stress, depression, or shame through alcohol (Keyes, Hatzenbuehler, and Hasin 2011). Gender literature, however, seldom distinguishes what motivates women to drink heavily, misuse alcohol, or develop AUD. The relationship between alcohol, gender, and social positioning is deeply tied to emotions, such as shame, fear, and anger. To deepen our understanding of how gender is performed through alcohol use, it is essential to examine the emotional landscape that supports these performances.
Anger, Fear, Trauma and Self
Cooley (1902 [1964]), in his chapter on hostility, theorized the primary emotions of fear and anger are closely tied social emotions. Fear stems from imagining oneself or similar others losing status or sympathy (p. 290). When one personally experiences or witnesses relatable others enduring persistent degradation without resistance, for example, fear is felt surrounding social interactions. Anger arises when people experience or witness injustices against a group they sympathize with (p. 285). We can think of this pattern as fear occurring prior to interaction while anger unfolds following mistreatment. Notably, both men and women who experience repeated traumas experience both fear and anger more frequently than those who do not (Kleim et al. 2013), indicating that people extend their sense of injustice beyond themselves to others in similar situations.
Continuous traumatic stress is less common in society and severely impactful on our perception of self (Eagle and Kaminer 2013). Beyond the stressful situation, individuals may come to perceive that they lack power to alter persistent traumatic stress, or the legacy of family AUD, contributing to fear (Kemper 1978). For example, continued harassment or denigration may lead individuals to fear similar treatment elsewhere. This variant of fear is often disclosed as anxiety. These individuals would sympathize with others experiencing imagined or real similar wrongs.
Anger, much like fear and anxiety, is an emotion which depends upon social relations. Where fear is related to a lack of power, anger comes from a lack of status (Kemper 1978). When a child, for instance, finds that they lack status compared with other siblings or students, anger develops (Griffith et al. 2022; Harris and Howard 1985), much like employees witnessing differential treatment along gender lines. Although this example highlights the family, educational, and occupational spheres, processes of status expectations flow throughout society, with people expecting status on the basis of their characteristics, such as gender (Ridgeway 2001), and stereotypes associated with them. Status contradictions arise when gender roles change (Hughes 1945) as seen in many societies today (Khan 2023; Soni and Deb 2020). In fact, recent scholarship underscores both implicit and explicit gender stereotypes around the world are shifting toward neutrality (Charlesworth and Banaji 2022) paralleling alcohol use trends.
This shift aligns with Goffman’s (1963) insight that people navigate the world through a tension between the virtual self (i.e., the image people perform and others expect from them) and the actual self (i.e., how individuals see and understand themselves). When these self-aspects do not match, particularly under strict gender expectations, people may experience emotional discomfort or feel out of place in the roles they are expected to play. This tension between how people are seen and how they see themselves offers a useful framework for interpreting my participants’ narratives of drinking, emotion, resistance, and gender performance. Although these performances are often assumed to occur in front of audiences, Mead’s (1934) notion of the generalized other clarifies how social expectations are ingrained into the self and remain active as moral schemas remain internalized and emotionally charged, even in solitude (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013). For individuals with stigmatized identities, such as those experiencing AUD, shame, fear, and anger are not dependent on immediate audiences (Scheff 2003), but are shaped by the internalized gaze of others and a lifetime of learned moral expectations. Thus, drinking alone does not mean gender disappears as the virtual/actual tension persists through imagined judgement and discomfort, and the generalized other remains present in memory, ritual, and self-reflection.
Methods and Data
Sample and Site Selection
To investigate how women and men do gender through alcohol use, I draw on interview data from 16 current or past members of a 12-step recovery community from a metropolitan area in Canada. I purposively sampled my participants because sampling from recovery communities allows scholars to differentiate between people who formed AUD versus people who drink frequently or heavily. Furthermore, participants in recovery consider and discuss the experiences, thoughts, and actions that fostered their alcohol misuse (Randles and Tracy 2013). Without these aspects of recovery, or if I had interviewed current people ostensibly suffering from AUD, my respondents may not have actually experienced an AUD or reflected upon their drinking practices. Moreover, this data collection site is a central hub for addiction and recovery from alcohol in Canada. As a multicultural city, my participants developed their alcohol misuse across North America while currently residing in this metropole.
All participants had been involved with the international 12-step organization Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which remains one of the most influential and successful recovery programs globally (Kelly, Humphreys, and Ferri 2020). AA’s 12 steps, 12 traditions, and 12 spiritual principles structure both personal transformation and collective group life. The steps guide members through moral self-inventory, confession, and spiritual repair—linked to principles such as honesty, hope, faith, and courage—with the ultimate goal of bringing the self one performs (the virtual self) into closer alignment with the self one privately experiences (the actual self), reducing the need to consume alcohol by increasing authenticity and moral guidance (Wilson 1939 [2001]). This is achieved by the common expectation in recovery that the only step that must be practiced perfectly is step 1, which is about living life honestly. Although AA emphasizes ethical and emotional realignment, it also reflects gendered expectations: AA informally encourages men to sponsor men (64 percent of Canadian AA members) and women to sponsor women (35 percent of Canadian AA members), revealing that both drinking and recovery are understood as gendered experiences (Alcoholics Anonymous 2022). These spiritual, emotional, and relational dynamics shape how individuals make sense of their past alcohol use and identities.
Data and Codes
My data consist of transcribed 17 semistructured interviews from 16 self-identified alcoholics (n = 16, 9 self-identified women and 7 self-identified men, all with educational experience, and majority White) from across North America. I used retrospective interviews; a technique used to gather and analyze unique life stories of people to create a complementary reconstruction of similar experiences (Budach 2012). I simultaneously used a critical realist approach throughout interviewing (Brönnimann 2022). This practice involved asking questions related to gender and alcohol use, then modifying the interview guide as new themes emerged. For example, I asked questions related to gendered family dynamics and alcohol consumption (e.g., “Please tell me about drinking practices in your household”), then incorporated new questions aimed at surprising responses (e.g., “How did exclusion from carpentry work contribute to your drinking as a woman?”). Through this method, I was able to glean new information from participants that sharpened current theory of gender and alcohol misuse. I conducted this study from July to September in 2021 via fliers, convenience and snowball sampling. I first posted fliers near recovery centers, then snowball sampled from the first participants (Table 1).
Demographic Information.
Source: Adapted from Uscola, Colter J. 2023. “Drinker Identity Development: Shame, Pride, and a Thirst to Belong.” Society and Mental Health 13(1): 45–60.
My interviews averaged 104 minutes in length and ranged from 60 to 145 minutes. I coded and analyzed my transcribed data in NVivo 14 by, initially, perusing for known themes related to alcohol misuse, such as shame and guilt, and perceived traumas. Initially, I produced 111 universal codes. I then reduced this to 9 central themes. To finalize my codes, I applied a retroductive coding strategy (Ragin and Amoroso 2019) that focused on known factors associated with alcohol misuse, while homing in on unknown factors, such as “femininity and anger” or “masculinity and fear.” My codes represent patterned emotions (i.e., anger and fear), gender (i.e., women and men), and status dynamics (e.g., alcohol and increased status) across my sample. To triangulate my research and enhance reliability and validity, I used two types of data reliability tests: intracoder and intercoder reliability tests. Having initially coded my data in 2022, I confirmed my codes in 2023 to cross-check my original interpretation. Following this, I trained an independent researcher on my coding strategy, and they coded 20 percent (Potter and Levine-Donnerstein 1999) of my data (10 percent men and 10 percent women); all codes received well above the required 80 percent agreement (Krippendorff 1980; Table 2).
Codes Related to Gendered Performance through Alcohol.
Results
To understand how my participants performed gender through alcohol use, it is essential to understand the family-based trauma and marginalization that shaped their emotional landscapes and social experiences. Family-based trauma and marginalization created a pervasive emotional backdrop of fear and anger that influenced how my participants navigated social life. Notably, these two central emotions were closely tied to my participants’ gender identities in differing ways. I detail this process by focusing first on women, then men. In both cases, I begin where alcohol misuse began: trauma and marginalization. I then highlight how these processes fused my participants’ gender identities to the emotions fear and anger. I conclude each section discussing how alcohol allowed my participants to perform gender in ways that resist societal expectations of femininity or masculinity. Similarity by sex pushed me to consider how alcohol use practices varied by gender identity. My investigation revealed that women in my sample initially used alcohol as a tool for social mobility, while men drank to reject hegemonic masculinity. Yet over time, these strategies trapped women in seclusion and men in the roles they attempted to escape, contributing to the formation of AUD.
Women Performing Gender through Alcohol
Early trauma shaped women’s self-conceptions and alcohol use, fostering secrecy, shame, and emotional isolation. Feelings of self-blame, reinforced by secrecy, creating a feedback loop in which women struggled to reconcile their internal sense of worth with external expectations. Alcohol became a key mechanism for managing this dissonance. It helped these women suppress painful emotions and mask perceived inadequacies by developing hybrid femininities (Ispa-Landa and Oliver 2020) of high expectations—gender performances that merged emotional restraint, outward success, and internalized shame to meet conflicting ideals of womanhood. These hybrid feminine roles enabled them to maintain outward appearances while concealing inner turmoil. As the narratives in this section show, alcohol use functioned not only as a coping strategy but as a tool for navigating gendered scripts that demanded silence, conformity, and emotional control.
Women, Trauma, and Self-Blame
Women in my sample detailed extensive traumas that made them believe that they were bad and unworthy. Five of nine women expressed that they were sexually abused, while all faced physical and emotional abuse. Regardless of trauma type, the outcome was the same; after initially identifying external culprits, women eventually internalized blame. Liliya provides an example of how a lack of power contributed to keeping her self-conception a secret:
I had an uncle that abused me when I was 5, 6, 7 years old. . . . And you’re too shy to tell your parents and you don’t want to talk to your brothers and sisters about it. And you hold that in and he’s the perpetrator. And he makes you feel like you’re to blame. . . . Oh yeah, self-blame and secret and not tell anybody. . . . All I could think of is that I was bad.
Liliya detailed a horrible reality for many women. These abuses developed self-blame, just as Liliya and other female participants disclosed. Self-blame led to silent emotional isolation. Over time, this silence led to coping mechanisms tied to alcohol. Claudia considered this process, describing how concealing this self-aspect became intertwined with her AUD by saying, “alcoholism was a game of secrets, pretend and then just existing, drinking whenever and as much as I could, whenever I could get it.” This “game of secrets” was about maintaining a virtual self misaligned with the actual self (Goffman 1963). For women, alcohol helped them uphold their performance by numbing the fear, shame, and emotional pain that came with performing a version of femininity that did not reflect who they truly were. The game was about emotional survival in a world where authenticity risked rejection, judgment, or harm. In Summers-Effler’s (2004) words, alcohol misuse was a defensive strategy meant to reduce the cognitive and emotional tolls of real and perceived rejection (Abrutyn 2023). Contrary to research on femininity which frames alcohol use as an attempt to assimilate into male-dominated spaces (Peralta 2007), my findings suggest that women strategically engaged with alcohol as a form of resistance against their own social invisibility. That is, alcohol use did not mean conforming to masculinity for these women but as a tool to construct identities that countered their marginalization.
Marginalization beyond Home: School and Community
Education and community also shaped participants’ social rejection. Many experienced bullying, discrimination, and exclusion, which shaped their identities in ways that made them feel unworthy. Sam detailed this by describing the community she grew up in as made up of “very cruel, negative, bullying, [and] cowardly people.” Mistreatment did not stop there. Adults also reinforced these experiences, as Adrian, a 30-year-old woman who was sexually assaulted by a community member, described the devastating response she received when her mother approached the school for support:
I was called a slut and I was bullied . . . it was horrendous. . . . At one point, one of my very few friends in this small town, where I did not fit in at all, went to my mom and was like, “Adrian’s being bullied really badly. Like I’m concerned about her safety.” And my mom went to the school and the principal of the school said to my mother, “Adrian wouldn’t have such issues socially if she wasn’t such a freak.”
Adrian stated she “did not fit in at all,” which was a universal theme across participants. This dynamic, of feeling unworthy and out of place, pushed participants toward stigmatized roles related to alcohol. Many embraced roles like “the funny drunk,” as a way to be seen. The ability to be recognized, and to navigate social spaces that had previously excluded them, motivated women to immerse themselves in alcohol networks, using alcohol as a tool for social mobility. Departing from drinking to cope models that largely view women’s drinking as a way to escape trauma (Keyes et al. 2011; Kuntsche et al. 2006; Luciano et al. 2022), this finding shows women also used alcohol as a strategy to gain access to social status and belonging.
For some women, and, as I will discuss later,some men, early family dynamics reinforced their sense of invisibility. Annie described how the birth of her younger brother shifted the household’s attention away from her:
My mom kicked my dad out when I was three. My brother had just been born, so I went from being a kid with two parents that paid all their attention to me to being a kid with one super stressed-out single mom who had a baby. . . . I just thought that she didn’t love me, and that everybody loved my brother instead of me. It couldn’t be like, “They love us both.”
Many participants described how the birth of a younger male sibling reshaped family dynamics, shifting parental attention away from them. Abbie recalled, “Brian was born [and] suddenly, my parents . . . I felt a difference in the way that my dad’s family treated Brian versus me.” These experiences reflect a gendered pattern where daughters became invisible compared with their brothers, pushing them to seek recognition outside of the family. These spaces valued high-risk behavior over achievement, providing evidence as to why there is an intrinsic link between female risk-taking behavior and high rates of alcohol consumption (Siraj, Najam, and Ghazal 2021).
As gender theory suggests, athletics shaped family recognition, but not how expected. For these women, having a brother who was in athletics led to a further reduction in value. Erin highlights this process discussing how her older brother received value:
[Mom] would go to his lacrosse games. If the radio announcer didn’t announce his name enough times in the radio announcement, she would phone the radio station and say, “You didn’t talk about my son enough.” . . . She had scrapbooks of his lacrosse from the newspapers. When I was 17, I said to my mum, “Mom, what position do I play in baseball?” And I was a huge baseball player. She said, “Second base?” I said, “Nope.” “Third base?” “Nope.” I said, “Mom, I’ve been playing baseball for, easily, 10 years and you don’t know what position I play.”
Jenny also felt overlooked as her brother’s sports schedule dictated family life. She went on to say, “In a child’s brain, you go, ‘OK, well I’ll start to do hobbies and see if they come to my stuff.’ They dropped me off and picked me up.” These early attempts transitioned into the game of secrets, which became a way to gain recognition through hybrid femininity, as Breanna’s narrative shows:
I wanted to be part of this cute little bar, but how does a woman do that, because it’s not a social norm for a woman to go to a bar at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and drink. Men can do it, but we can’t. . . . So, I’d go out and buy my props. I’d go buy food, non-perishables . . . I’d go to the bar . . . and put my bags down on the counter and, “Ohhh. I just wanna have a drink.” “Oh, I’m just on my way home. Just stopping in for a few drinks.” Is that deceiving or what?!
Breanna’s strategy highlights the gendered constraints of alcohol consumption; while men could drink openly, women had to justify their presence in these spaces. Her use of props to disguise her drinking shows strategic engagement with gender norms, rather than passive participation in male drinking culture, complicating past research on gender performance and alcohol use (Dumbili 2015). Eventually, once she had gained entry into this social sphere, she no longer needed her disguise:
So that’s how I got in and made friends at the bar. And then I didn’t need my props anymore once the bag was out that I liked to drink and party, then I was accepted by guys at the bar.
The pursuit of recognition in alcohol-oriented male spaces, however, often came with a trade-off. Breanna explained how her security became dependent on a relationship with a man who embodied everything the drinker community valued:
Eventually I started dating and sleeping with one of the guys at the bar. And that was my security. And I told people I was really dating a bar stool, is what I was doing. I was just in love with the bar stool and that was basically what it was. He was funny. He was an alcoholic. He was in my clique. And he was smart. He was white. He had money and a car. So, if I ever ran out of money, he could buy me drinks.
For Breanna and others, alcohol became a means to an end, a way to access basic human needs of social status, recognition, security, and validation (Hillman, Fowlie, and MacDonald 2022; Maslow 1943). Alcohol also helped suppress emotions tied to gender identity.
Women, Fear, and Anger
Fear and anger, shaped by gendered trauma and exclusion, underpinned their secrecy. Traumas in the two primary spaces of home and school contributed to enduring fear: the fear of exclusion, the fear of failure, and the fear that pain would always be part of their lives. Notably, fear did not remain the primary emotion felt. Over time, fear transformed into anger. Becca illustrated fear:
So, here I am, being so egotistical, so cocky, so confident, but also so scared and . . . I think I’m so dumb, I’m not good in school. I don’t get it. And so, I had like this hierarchy of like . . . I can get away with anything because I’m good at talking and I’m skeptical . . . but I’m also so scared because I don’t know where to look [for direction].
The reality of it was that my participants always experienced additional harm, and in an attempt to overcome their fear and pain, they turned to alcohol. Adrian’s first drinking experience showed how alcohol muted her fear:
I remember feeling very adult. Very anxious . . . about the presence of this person who had molested me as a child. And my anxiety dissipated. Like it was everything everybody says. All of this anxiety melted away and instead I felt like very cool, very comfortable with myself. I felt like a peer to these people who I perceived as being very cool and . . . they were all adults in their 20s and 30s.
Although alcohol helped manage fear and gain recognition, it also fueled self-doubt and sabotage. Amanda, an actress and a business owner, reflected on how alcohol became a means of protecting herself from personal failure:
I would catch myself drinking the night before a big audition, because if I didn’t get it, then I could blame the alcohol, because it’s not me. Or, I could justify my belief pattern that you’re never going to achieve anything. Sometimes one, sometimes both. But alcohol actually held me back.
Fear never fully dissipated through alcohol use as it evolved into another emotion, anger. This fear-to-anger shift refines gender theories that tend to emphasize shame and guilt (Ford, Ham, and Kennedy 2025; Patock-Peckham, Canning, and Leeman 2018) rather than anger as an emerging form of defiance against persistent marginalization. Setbacks and marginalization shifted fear into anger. After years of taking one step forward and two steps back, persistent anger became an almost constant reminder of my participants’ subordinate position in society. With each additional setback, came more frustration. Adrian described this when she said, “I felt like it justified all of the rage that I felt. It was just one of those instances that confirmed I am right about my perception of the world as a fucking horrible place.” Erin similarly described her breaking point: “In my head, I’m thinking, here’s this angry fat tattooed girl, fuck off. Because I gave up on people. I gave up on trying to find my fit, so I just went fuck it.”
Erin’s words show a shift from inward fear to outward defiance. Breanna captured the cyclical process as she described alcohol as a source of emotional regulation, “[I drank alcohol to] get me out of my hatred mode. My anger. And get me to laughing mode and being fun and anxiety relief . . . anxiety relieving.” The problem with this process was that the longer it continued, the more anger female interlocutors felt, which drove more alcohol consumption to suppress it.
Women, Alcohol, and Hybrid Femininities of High Expectations
The preceding sections show how trauma and marginalization shaped women’s use of alcohol to manage fear, anxiety, anger, and social exclusion. However, it is also important to outline how alcohol played a central role in women’s pursuit of social status. Alexis, the youngest of two daughters, provides a narrative that reflects the experiences of all female participants. She felt overshadowed by her sister, Julie, who excelled in academics and received praise while Alexis coped with feelings of inadequacy:
My sister was always there. And I’ve called her a bookworm because she escaped into books, which was really healthy for her. . . . She completed school where I quit. When I quit school, my sister did her grade 11 and 12 while I worked. . . . Julie received lots of accolades and I just sort of accepted it and slumped down into my defeatist self. “Well, I’ll never be as good as her.” . . . She did so well in school and I envied her.
Alexis’s envy reflects a broader desire for validation and status. For Alexis and others, alcohol became a tool to manage feelings of inferiority and to perform gender in a way that mimicked the success she envied in her sister, much like other participants envied those others who found success in life. Alexis went on to outline how alcohol gave her the courage to alter her appearance and clothing style in an attempt to imitate her sister’s way of life:
When she got married . . . he was a university student and he seemed to have lots of money. He was a step up, which is how you feel when you’re coming from the lower side of life, you want to rise up and become better. Money is going to do that. If I could just marry a rich man, then I’d be happy. . . . Well, I was Mrs. Alexander Gold and he was the manager of the alcohol, the bar, and the catering part of the hotel. When we walked in, the staff looked at me with respect. I felt like somebody. . . . And alcohol gave me the courage to go and get my hair bleach blonde, and get a hairpiece. Wear certain clothes. I tried to dress like my sister. She had lots of money, her and her husband. And so, I wanted to dress like her.
Not only was alcohol a coping strategy (Kaysen et al. 2007), but it also functioned as a means of social mobility, granting women access to spaces where they could carve out validation and status. Although this example focuses on women gaining access to wealth through heterosexual relations, research shows that similar patterns also occur in same-sex relationships (Martell and Nash 2020). Additionally, alcohol became a tool for hybrid femininities of high expectation, allowing women to shape their identities in ways that challenged societal expectations. Alcohol, therefore, helped alleviate anxiety and fear. It gave them confidence to enter exclusive spaces, perform aspirational success, and pursue validation they struggled to receive through other means. These narratives highlight how women strategically used alcohol not only to cope with deep emotional wounds but also to seek visibility, legitimacy, and belonging in a world that consistently overlooked them.
Men Performing Masculinity through Alcohol
Men in this study drank alcohol as a form of emotional avoidance that resisted the demands of hegemonic masculinity, ultimately producing hybrid masculine identities of low expectation. Early trauma and socialization into emotional suppression left them fearful of vulnerability and ashamed of themselves. Drinking masked their pain and managed the tension between their authentic selves and the demands of hegemonic masculinity. It similarly allowed men to find conditional belonging in drinking cultures. By navigating these tensions between external demands and internal desires, they developed hybrid masculinities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014) of low expectations (i.e., identities that resisted the pressure to embody dominant masculine ideals while tethering men to alcohol, and the culture associated with it, as a means of survival). The following sections detail how trauma, marginalization, self-discovery and the pursuit of social acceptance shaped men’s trajectories into AUD.
Men, Trauma, and the Virtual Self
Men’s early experiences of physical, sexual, and emotional trauma formed the foundation of their reliance on alcohol as a tool for emotional avoidance. These traumas created lasting fear, anxiety, and a sense of moral failure, making men feel like bad people. For example, Cesar stated, “[his father] did drink a lot and he was violent with [Cesar, his brother, and his mother].” Trevor similarly described how childhood sexual abuse left him “pent up with fear and anxiety,” while Brandon stated that “the emotional stuff fucks me up even more” than his mother’s physical violence and suicide attempts.
Unlike women in this study, however, who often reflected on their pain, men frequently suppressed their emotions as expressing their feelings risked additional punishment or rejection. Being taught to avoid addressing their pain, they turned to alcohol as a coping mechanism that allowed them to maintain an illusion of internal stability.
Across time, however, men’s emotional suppression produced a “virtual self,” a mask designed to conform to masculine ideals, which concealed their scared and emotionally vulnerable actual selves. For example, Cesar detailed how he learned to navigate strict masculine expectations:
I always had two conversations going on. My brain is trained that way. . . I’ve got the conversation I’m having with you, but I also got this other conversation going on. I’m trying to be . . . like two steps ahead of the other person with my own conversation and the one I’m having, right. And that was out of . . . survival, before.
Cesar’s account demonstrates that alcohol use was about surviving trauma while enveloped in a masculine system that denies masculine emotional expression, complicating past research which states drinking is about domination (Teese, Van Doorn, and Gill 2023). By relying on alcohol to maintain their virtual selves, men rejected emotional openness and reinforced their socialization into stoic masculinity, which socially isolated them.
Men, Marginalization, and Acceptance
The men in my sample often felt excluded from both mainstream social groups and dominant masculine hierarchies, finding belonging in drinking circles where alcohol use became the condition of acceptance. Stephen described this by saying, “You’d probably still get invited to events, especially because we liked partying.” Yet exclusion came from many directions: some men were racialized as outsiders, others pushed aside because of family financial struggles or sibling comparisons, and some were stigmatized for their sexuality or their parents’ reputations. When it came to race, one participant, Cesar, a gay, mixed-race man, disclosed how his family racialized him as an outsider:
I wasn’t accepted by either side of my family for being mixed-race. . . . The white side was like, “Oh, you’re not all white,” and the Mexican side was like, “You’re not Mexican.” And, so . . . everything just put me as an outlier, as alienated.
Beyond race, Cesar described how presenting as both hypermasculine and concealing his sexuality made him feel excluded from both gay and straight culture, noting that his popularity was fake. Trevor was similarly unable to find acceptable roles among his family. However, Trevor struggled to find value through athletics and, like the women in my sample, was overshadowed by his younger brother:
There was a heavy focus on my brother and his hockey career. And he was a very, very talented AAA hockey player . . . scouted at a very young age. So, a lot of that attention was on him. Like, driving him around, and I just kinda floated through the cracks.
Although Trevor’s brother found status and validation as a budding young man in hockey, Trevor perceived that his parents and friends rejected his dream of becoming a professional wrestler. Other men struggled to form bonds because of stigma, like Alan, who said, “I think there was this sense of like, ‘oh, don’t hang out with Alan. His mom’s the fucking gong show of the street.’” He described how children in town ostracized him by saying:
I have this really distinct memory of middle school. I went over to this kid’s house on the last day of school, and . . . they said, “Hold on a second,” and they all went inside and they all came out and just said, “Hey. You’re not allowed to come in,” and they shut the door and I was the only kid standing in the street.
Experiences such as these left men feeling like outsiders at home and in society, producing a sense of exclusion into adolescence and adulthood. Rather than drinking to display dominance or achievement, as common gender theories suggest (Brabete and Sánchez-López 2012; Good et al. 2008; Ramšak 2022), these men instead used alcohol to navigate exclusion by securing acceptance through hybrid masculinities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014) of low expectations. Stephen detailed this by saying,
Being able to have that . . . it’s nice being able to have certain low expectations of you or having the expectation that you’re going to behave in a certain way because then you’re not letting anyone down. . . . And when that’s what people expect of you, it’s kind of freeing. But with that feeling of freedness [sic], came the surrender of freedom to alcohol. I gave up that freedom in order to get a different, what felt like, a different freedom of people not expecting that much from me.
Yet as Stephen and others revealed, this freedom came with the cost of the gradual erosion of their moral compasses, further complicating the idea that alcohol is simply a tool of male power (Khan and David 2021). Rather than representing dominance for these men, alcohol created a double bind by providing an escape from pressure to adopt masculine ideals while simultaneously reinforcing their dependence on alcohol and the culture associated with it. My male participants believed they had to hide their actual selves, because the same voice that told them “stealing is bad” also told them they should “be ashamed of who they were,” as Stephen put it, which was an internalized lesson from their upbringing. In using alcohol to craft alternative selves, they resisted their socialization. These performed selves could not escape the fear, anger, and painful memories of their pasts.
Men, Fear, and Anger
Men frequently discussed their fears related to a “bad” or hurtful masculine identity. For example, Ralph expressed his fear of getting sober by saying, “for a guy like me, getting sober, one of the fears I had was, who am I gonna be?” This fear reflects the central challenge of hegemonic masculinity within this sample. That is, men were expected to maintain a tough and emotionless persona while also experiencing persistent anxiety of losing a substance that allowed them to continually reforge gender identities and gain acceptance. All men in my sample disclosed these looming fears. Another respondent, Stephen, provides additional detail associated with why these anxieties occurred:
I was like, “I’m afraid of what’ll happen if I stop drinking. I’m afraid.” I’m keeping what I feel like are bad parts of my personality at bay by drinking as much as I do and if I stop, then those will come out. It’s like, I don’t know what this is. I don’t want to deal with it. Like, I’m afraid of the person I’ll turn into if I stop.
Rooted in the pressure to conform to traditional masculinity, this fear often transformed into anger, not the dominance and aggression we would expect (Locke and Mahalik 2005; Messner and Montez de Oca 2005; Miller et al. 2014). Unable to express vulnerability, many men turned frustrations inward. That is, they became angry at themselves for not living up to the “ideal” masculine role, while also angry at society for demanding they suppress their emotional, caring, and creative selves. Men, therefore, did not initially use alcohol to assert power, but in response to masculinity. For men like Cesar, anger became a form of resistance to being defined by masculine norms that obscured their authentic selves. Cesar reflected upon this by saying,
I was angry. Like, instead of feeling sad or lonely, I’d just feel angry. . . . When I wasn’t drunk, I was angry, right. I think underneath that, I was really sad and I was really lonely and I was really hurt.
Cesar disclosed prior to this excerpt that he never expressed his authentic self out of fear that he would suffer harm from his father. He described feeling like a fraud, always keeping a secret, much like the women in the study. Years of secrecy, however, without a pathway to authentic self-expression led to anger and alcohol to relieve pain. Ralph’s account outlines how alcohol helped navigate contradictory masculinity, a theme that continued as these men crafted hybrid identities:
I look back on my drinking, and drinking gave me that ability, which a lot of us have, to feel okay within ourselves. To create that false sense of security that I needed to be okay in the world. Because I had always identified as something other than who I thought I was. . . . I was changing into these personalities that were able to get along in the world, and that was constant. I was never one to know myself until I got sober. And start feeling a comfortability within myself, about who I was as a person, and what I eventually found out is: I’m not a bad person at all. I’m a pretty good person. But I didn’t know that.
Ralph detailed how alcohol helped him navigate life once he lost sight of his authentic self, offering a “false sense of security” and a temporary reprieve from self-directed shame and fear. These personas reflected what Ralph and others believed others expected from them, which they did not reject until achieving sobriety and finding their authentic selves. This shows how both the men and women in this study played the game of secrets to be “okay in the world.” For men, however, alcohol not only relieved fear and anger but also helped in creating hybrid masculine identities of low expectation. That is, drinking allowed them to step partially outside the rigid scripts of hegemonic masculinity, just as women in this study leveraged alcohol to step outside strict feminine norms, while tethering them to a substance that both masked and reinforced their vulnerabilities.
In this way, cycles of fear and anger, temporarily numbed through alcohol, offered conditional belonging and a fleeting sense of authenticity, even as their dependence and isolation deepened. Tim directly contradicts the domineering masculinity often linked to alcohol:
Party Tim was never the problem; I wasn’t narcissistically going around abusing people in my drunkenness, interestingly enough. It was a total escapist thing, where I could not accept life on life’s terms. I was selling increasingly larger parts of my soul to the devil or archetypal evil in exchange for oblivion, for the ability to not feel and not deal with anything, to the point where I completely had no, absolutely no control over drinking, and it was an endeavor that was the goal, the goal was to be blacked out. I reached endgame alcoholism in my twenties.
Tim’s narrative reflects the disjuncture between the virtual self and actual self, rather than performing hegemonic masculinity through drinking. In this way, alcohol became a coping strategy for resisting dominant gender scripts he could not inhabit, even as it eventually overwhelmed him, highlighting the psychological toll of navigating a world in which one’s authentic self feels incompatible with socially expected roles. This incompatibility motivated a search for a role they could adopt, despite pressure to conform.
Men, Alcohol, and Hybrid Identities of Low Expectations
Men who did not fit traditional masculinity often formed hybrid identities shaped by subcultures or male role models. Petr, for example, described how he navigated this tension:
The identities were pretty limited where I grew up. . . . So, I went into metal. In retrospect, it’s this kind of trying to prove some kind of masculine. My brother was really into that kind of thing. And so, it was a draw between him or my dad.
Petr rejected his father’s form as it required Petr to become a “rage-aholic drinker” who was never at fault, who believed he was “the smartest guy,” and who would “physically and emotionally abuse” his future kids and wife, not to mention women, in general. For him, aligning with his brother felt like the lesser of two evils, highlighting critical engagement with which forms of masculinity felt realistically performable despite persistent pressure to conform. He elaborated on what his father had taught him:
Fucking guidance to go out and get laid as much as possible and I don’t know, fucking not take shit from people, and have a fear of intimacy and relationships. Be angry, a lot of anger. . . . This is a lot of generations of hatred, fear, and anger.
Here, Petr showed intergenerational transmission of masculinity, along with the emotional isolation, aggression, and fear linked to it. Like others, he used alcohol not to conform, but to resist this form of male expression, crafting a masculinity grounded in self-reflection and rejection, challenging masculine conformity versus failure frameworks (Connell 1995) and supporting recent work on hybrid masculinities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014). Where Petr aligned with subcultural masculinity to resist his father’s influence, Jessie initially turned to alcohol as a creative and emotional outlet instead:
I would get some juice from it. . . . Dark spiritual juice. . . . I could drink bottles of wine and have hours maybe of when it was working for me. . . . Maybe get an idea for a poem or something, ya know, and then as time goes on, that . . . that window of freedom just becomes shorter and shorter and then you realize, like, “oh man, in between feeling good and being blacked out is a non-existent thing suddenly.” It’s just bad and blacked out.
He expanded upon these early experiences and how alcohol often carried emotional depth that disrupted strict masculine expectations: “I had another friend who was really artistic and was an alcoholic as well, and we would drink together and sit around and draw and . . . those were nice moments.”
Jessie’s narrative shows how alcohol briefly enabled introspective, emotionally open masculinities that defied hegemonic norms. Yet as time passed, the emotional freedom gave way to the very dependence that men were trying to resist. Alcohol, rather than facilitating self-discovery, eventually narrowed men’s options the closer they got to AUD.
Many participants found themselves stuck between the emotional relief alcohol offered and the masculine pressures of drinking culture itself that reinscribed hegemonic values (e.g., toughness, detachment, bravado). Jessie again offers insight into this struggle by contrasting his emotionally distant father with the kind of man he aspired to be:
Like, he was so out of touch emotionally with himself . . . this man white-knuckled his way through the most intense neuroses and anxiety. There’s certainly no warmth. I think about the type of man I would like to be [and it] was certainly none of that . . . I will dance. . . . Warmth, generosity, kindness, compassion. All the good stuff.
Jessie’s authentic vision of masculinity, like others, involved emotional openness, rejecting the stoic, cold version of masculinity that their father figures represented. All participants consciously compared themselves to other drinkers, seeking to resist pressures to adopt domineering forms of masculinity, while simultaneously becoming more deeply tied to the norms associated with it. Stephen reflected upon the cost of trying to drink against the grain of hegemonic masculinity when asked by a peer to “just try not drinking”:
And, who might you have become [if you quit drinking]?
[Dad] was violent and aggressive all of the time. And, I was like, I don’t want to be successful because that’s who I’ll turn into. I think what I was afraid of was that I would become that person . . . and not have the excuse of having been drunk.
Stephen described how he crafted hybrid masculine performances:
Yeah. Over and over again. I would meet a new group of people and I would kind of change. I developed a new identity to fit in . . . but also, it’s like, what do I think these people will think is interesting or what is a cool story or [personality] that I can develop for this social group.
In short, men in this study used alcohol as a means to navigate the constraints of hegemonic masculinity. Alcohol allowed them to avoid the emotional burden of traditional masculinity by offering an escape from fear, shame and pressure to conform. Across time, men crafted hybrid identities that both rejected traditional ideals and embraced a form of masculinity defined by low expectations. Alcohol thus provided these men with temporary relief from the emotional conflicts they faced by having external performances out of sync with their authentic selves. Like the women, these men performed publicly to hide their authentic identities. Yet where women used alcohol to carve out worth and gain social mobility, men often embraced underperformance and invisibility as a form of resistance to the roles they were expected to fill.
Discussion
Women, Men, and Alcohol Misuse in a Changing World
Decades of research show that male and female drinking rates are converging as gender roles shift in households, work, and society (Churchill and Craig 2022; Diekman and Eagly 2000; Oláh, Kotowska, and Richter 2018; Parker et al. 2022; Retzinger 1995; Zuo and Tang 2000). This study underscores that three experiences of familial and community marginalization, ostracization, and trauma, something that is nearly two times more likely for women than men (Olff 2017), create a persistent dissonance between the virtual self (the role society expects individuals to play) and the actual self (their authentic identity). This tension fuels fear and anger, which alcohol temporarily soothes by blurring the distance between conflicting selves. However, women today experience more pressure within male-dominated fields, such as in medicine (Cardador, Hill, and Salles 2021), science, technology, engineering, and medicine (Casad et al. 2021), and academia (Winslow and Davis 2016), and are assessed more harshly than men (Nelson et al. 2023) and hindered by extensive barriers (Adikaram and Razik 2023). With a persistent lack of power and status comes social pain (Abrutyn 2023) and an ever present need to manage it.
My findings underscore that persistent trauma and subordination fostered fear of authentic gender expression. This fear, however, manifested differently in men and women. For women, fear was rooted in persistent exclusion and systemic barriers that undermined their perceived legitimacy in their high-status roles. As Claudia described, they played a “game of secrets,” using alcohol to carve out space within spaces of male dominance. That is, these women developed hybrid femininities of high expectations. They played the game by drinking to carve out space while masking emotions, performing success while concealing their vulnerability. Men feared success because it reinforced the experienced hegemonic masculinity of their traumatic pasts. The game men played was therefore about distancing their authentic selves from the masculine role that family and society expected them to play through crafting hybrid masculinities of low expectations. Thus, although both genders feared success, women’s fear stemmed from exclusion, where men’s fear came from internalized rection of dominant masculinity. This aligns with research linking fear to posttraumatic stress disorder (Gonzalez and Martinez 2014) and sexual trauma (Roth and Lebowitz 1988). What was unanticipated is how fear and anxieties of each gender group were directed toward the same object—success—in oppositional ways. The pursuit of success, for women, and the distancing from success, for men, had the same outcome of heavy consumption and the adoption of a drinker role (Uscola 2023).
Anger also increased across time as my participants described that they hated the world and their roles in it. However, their gender roles were what colored their anger. Though Roth and Lebowitz (1988) also linked anger to sexual trauma, I show how anger also ties to both emotional traumas, such as those experienced by persistent hinderances in society, and persistent expectations related to masculine success (especially when achievement is a reminder of abuse). However, anger was gendered. For women, anger occurred from repeated exclusion and marginalization, which drove frustration with societal hinderances that limited their opportunities. For men, anger revolved around hegemonic success, which both constrained men and reminded them of their past traumas. Alcohol was a common coping strategy despite these gendered differences.
Resistance is therefore central to my findings, but not how we imagine. In line with Dumbili (2022), traumatized women used consumption of alcohol as a resource to resist gender oppression and exclusion. When oppression and ostracization continued, fear and anger increased alongside consumption, while drinking alcohol paradoxically overpowered their pursuit of success. Similarly, as men resisted their socialization into hegemonic norms, fear of success and anger at societal expectations motivated this path, increasing alcohol consumption to resist domineering norms and leading to AUD. This distinction underscores that feminine resistance was directed at overcoming exclusion, while masculine resistance targeted distancing themselves from social scripts tying masculinity to power and success.
My respondents’ narratives underscore how central emotions are to the construction and maintenance of a social self (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2020; Abrutyn and Zhang 2024), which has key implications for how we study gender identity, not just in the context of alcohol or substance misuse, but in a variety of activities. Thus, future research could explore alcohol as a cultural object shaping drinking schemas across social groups (cf. Rawlings and Childress 2021). Second, as empowerment means different things for different groups (Lincoln et al. 2002), studies that investigate dimensions of empowerment and their impact on gender identities, positive and negative, may home in on which narratives do more harm than good and vice versa and for who. Additionally, many participants reflected on being valued less than their siblings, which contributed to their sense of familial marginalization. This dynamic of caring for one sibling over another may represent a critical pathway to social pain, alcohol misuse, and AUD. Future research that explicitly investigates how being an “undervalued child” shapes identity, emotion, and substance use could provide valuable insight into the intergenerational and relational roots of marginalization. Lastly, as this is the first study to identify traumatized and marginalized individuals resisting hegemony through alcohol use, future studies may hone in on this distinction as a way to identify those who perform hegemonic masculinity through drinking and those who are attempting to resist it through constructing hybrid masculinities.
Limitations
This study has limitations related to sample size and retrospective methods. Regarding sample size, saturation is often considered the gold standard by which qualitative research is measured (Fusch and Ness 2015), with as few as six participants able to reach saturation depending on the nature of the topic (Guest, Bunce, and Johnson 2006). To account for small sample size, I present only universal patterns in the data for each gender group. For parsimony, emotional, physical, and sexual traumas were collapsed into the single category of trauma. Regarding memory, throughout my interviews, many participants disclosed “blank spots” in their memories from many of the traumas endured. However, these areas in one’s autobiographical memory were often coupled with emotionally charged and vivid experiences. As experiences associated with fear are especially influential on memory retrieval (Jimenez et al. 2020), these experiences were easily recalled. This provided an opportunity to focus my interviews on these areas and expanded outward from them, linking experiences to emotions, and then gender and alcohol use.
Conclusion
Contrary to recent gender scholarship (Utrata 2019), I show how alcohol misuse often resists hegemony by managing fear and anger. My participants were all relegated to low status positions across time. For women, they formed hybrid femininities of high expectations, while men crafted identities of low expectations. For women, alcohol enabled resistance to oppressive expectations; for men, it became a tool to reject the dominant masculine ideals they had been socialized to embody. Participants also all experienced trauma, which led to fear of social interactions because of potential exclusion. Thus, they were trapped in their fear (for women, fear of failure; for men, fear of success) which made them unable to perform without alcohol. As both women and men came closer to the things they feared, anger intensified and spurred further drinking.
The gender gap in alcohol misuse is a complex social issue. For men, modern shifts in gender roles allow sensitivity and supportiveness, which reduces the pressure to embody traditional, domineering masculinity (Elliott 2016). For women, however, the demand for high status and power exacerbates the challenges faced by traumatized and marginalized individuals. This is especially troubling amid widespread anti-DEI policies which undermine inclusion. These policies could worsen the challenges I have outlined for marginalized women and other disadvantaged groups who are under pressure to excel, further intensifying feelings of exclusion, fear, and social pain. Specifically, such policies could erase progress made in creating spaces where both women and men feel free to express hybrid gender roles, increasing societal pressures that lead toward alcohol misuse. For those without trauma, alcohol use likely reflects the hegemonic order, as seen in settings like fraternity parties or sports bars, where hegemonic scripts are often reproduced (Peralta 2007). But for my participants, alcohol was a creative, if costly, way to build alternative virtual selves in defiance of a world that denied their actual worth.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I want to extend my sincerest thanks to Drs. Seth Abrutyn, Amin Ghaziani, and Michela Musto for providing extensive suggestions and guidance throughout the writing process of this manuscript. I also thank Yijia Zhang, Lara Antebi, and Kate Feldstein for extended discussions that contributed to the crafting of this manuscript. Last, thank you to my participants for sharing their stories with the world.
