Sport, alcohol and women: an emerging research agenda

This article describes an emerging research agenda for defining the relationship between women, sport and alcohol as a feminist issue. Characterised as a “holy trinity”, the relationship between sport, drinking, particularly heavy drinking, and masculinity remains a popular orthodoxy. While not disputing the enduring and influential symbolic, economic, political and cultural power relations between men, sport and alcohol, the article argues that our proclivity towards framing drinking and sport through the lens of “hegemonic masculinity” gives rise to a theoretical and empirical silence when it comes to research on women, sport and alcohol in the Australian context and beyond. We interrogate four key interrelated research problems for feminist scholars of sport: i) the framing of sport-related drinking as hegemonic masculinity; ii) the need for new theoretical/conceptual/analytical frameworks that have emerged from the framing of women’s relationship to alcohol as invariably problematic; iii) a recognition that sport-related drinking for women is as pleasurable and problematic as it is for men; and iv) the relationship between sport and alcohol relative to a growing emphasis on cultural and gender diversity in Australian sport.