Location: Maynooth (Ireland). Date: 24– 27 August 2010

Long Abstract

Alcohol and cultural associations have been studied for a number of years and linked to important topics such as identity and gender. Traditional anthropological studies have found a near cross-cultural universal that, in nations where alcohol is consumed, males tend to imbibe at a higher rate, whereas women are more likely to abstain. Two key exceptions to this cross-cultural gender division occur in Greece and in modern Ireland. Ireland, perhaps more than any other nation, is linked to the imaginings of alcohol, and recent studies have shown that the younger Irish females may consume more than their male counterparts, which has sparked notions of a new "crisis", which is of course not new or unique to Irish commentators.

Significantly, these younger women are of childbearing age, and the image of the female drunkard is inextricably associated with inept motherhood in the public imagination (an image dating back to Hogarth's Gin Lane [1751]). In a Europe, which is redefining notions of motherhood, it behoves us to take stock of such imaginings in Europe around the so-called historical and cultural "crisis" of mothers who drink.

This workshop will investigate these complicated imaginings of "crisis" and its implications for not only children, but also for their mothers, and for nations states as they react to globalised health concerns regarding alcohol. Critical ethnographic discussions of issues associated with the increasingly accepted demonization of a maternal drinker are clearly linked to images of mothers in general, and perhaps alcohol as a cultural object more specifically.

Discussant: Dimitra Gefou-Madianou

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Convenors

Tanya Cassidy (NUIM) email
Anne Fox (Galahad SMS Ltd/UCL) email