Writing Alcohol

Writing Alcohol, Drinking Studies Network Conference 2024  University of Bristol, 1 – 3 March 2024

By Sam Goodman and Deborah Toner 

At the “Where are we Now?” conference of the Drinking Studies Network in late 2021, constructions of the “ideal” emerged as an important area of research in our field, and this helped to inspire the theme of “Writing Alcohol” for our fifth international conference in Bristol, 1-3 March 2024. Building from the goal of examining how constructions of the “ideal” are formulated, contested, and changed through writing, we wanted this conference to delve deeply into different forms of writing about alcohol across a range of issues, time, space, genre, disciplines and more. 

A recurrent theme of the conference was the link made between indulgence and divulgence across a range of media, and historical or geographical contexts. As many panels and panellists illustrated, these concepts are linked in both form and content, with various confessional modes of writing and creative production used as a means for artists, authors, influencers or the general public to explore and share their relationship to alcohol. For example, the papers of Ellie Moore, Gemma Cobb and Claire Davey, and ensuing discussion chaired by Emily Nicholls, considered the divulgence of drinking behaviours in complementary contexts. Cobb’s exploration of ‘Quit Lit’ memoirs and Davey’s of social media campaigns especially show the attraction of genres that promise (and deliver) drinking ‘revelations’ (particularly in the form of confessions of shameful or secretive drinking behaviours). This evokes the moral panics of previous generations around female indulgence, repackaged for a digital era. These texts speak to the creation, popularisation and at times even glamourisation of a particular kind of problematic female drinking identity within contemporary culture, one echoed in ‘sad girl’ fictions in contemporary literature, television, and film, and, as Moore noted, pressuring those uninterested in excess to conceal their sobriety.

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Steven Earnshaw’s consideration of the role of song lyrics in the case of Adele and Amy Winehouse contrasted this earlier focus on everyday drinking with the media interest and popular tropes of the ‘troubled’ star, whilst highlighting the surprising lack of critical writing on the subject. Elsewhere, James Nicholls and Dan Malleck explored the role of the state’s interest in the indulgence of its citizens, and its perennial efforts to curb, arrest or alter their habits through public information campaigns. The divulgence of drinking behaviours encouraged in medical questionnaires, surveys and suchlike and the illustration of their ‘consequences’ raised questions about how governments and public health organisations continue to frame drinking as loaded with moral issue, supported by Dorota Dias-Lewandowska’s consideration of the longer history of state intervention in drinking in Poland and elsewhere. Divulgence of drinking behaviours was not always the extractive process that some of these texts suggest, however, with James Kneale’s paper highlighting the way that it can help to tell the largely untold social history of Britain’s Desi pubs. As well as insight into the drinking culture of a community overlooked by historians of alcohol, such efforts also allow for the rethinking and recentring of British Asians in the changing landscape of late twentieth century Britain.  

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It was perhaps unsurprising – in a conference on “Writing Alcohol” – to find that a second significant theme was the textuality and materiality of drinking. Multiple papers sought to engage with the textual practice of specific authors, cultures or historical periods and the role and recurrence of drinkers and drinking within them. These included personal letters, diaries and published memoirs from the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 as Deborah Toner acknowledged, through to Irish and Irish-American travelogues of the 1970s and beyond as addressed by Alice Mauger. Callum Smith and Stephen Spencer considered the textuality of drinking in the popular journalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inviting us to consider the role of drinking as a problematic behaviour in and of itself, or as a useful tool in a wider political or social campaign. Judith Boyle’s close reading of cocktail books and Dariusz Galasinski’s analysis of the language of wine tasting notes explored the shift in individual behaviours around alcohol and the performance of ‘expertise’ on a social level, indicative of a contrast between concerns over the volume of drinking towards greater consideration of drinking ‘correctly’ at different historical points. 

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However, as some delegates argued, this materiality was not limited to written words alone, but rather a product of the relationship between text and other written or visual media. Graham Harding’s exploration of the digital archive illustrated how this is not a resource that offers information alone, but rather leads the researcher into the consideration of other texts, forming a composite picture of complementary sources through which we attempt to locate both drink and drinker. Tom Goodacre’s autoethnography of craft beer showed how fieldnotes and reflective writing were supported and augmented by the visual record, the capture of dialogue and encounters with interlocutors, and the role of labelling and marketing in directing a drinker’s behaviours, forming a holistic picture of how the drinking subject interpreted their behaviour in the midst of a connected web of (para)text. Victoria Wells, Tom Thurnell-Read and Robert Deakin similarly accentuated the visual, drawing a correspondence between the dominant image of the ideal pub and its realisation in reality; as Wells in particular noted, there is a circularity to this process of idealisation and creation – as pub owners attempt to create the ‘perfect’ traditional pub based on expectations built through social media, CAMRA and other cultural sources, they paradoxically get further from the authenticity they are trying to achieve. 

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This tension in the relationship between the textuality, visuality and materiality of drinking points to another theme that emerged strongly throughout the conference, that of translation across, and the marking out of, boundaries between different concepts, genres, media, terminologies, and symbols of alcohol. Iain Smith, for instance, discussed how the boundaries in the conceptual relationship between alcoholism and insanity shifted to accommodate changing medical perceptions of female drinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth century. Dissecting Jonathan Swift’s satirical writings, Lucy Cogan highlighted the author’s tendency to shift between “quiet” and “loud” modes when writing about his own drinking practices compared to those of his servants or the lower social orders in general. Amy Smith and Hedvig Widmalm examined the narrative strategies employed in legal petitions and court records to negotiate the boundaries of women’s authority in the management of English alehouses and Swedish taverns in the early modern period. This involved acts of translation, ascribing their own activities to related men in the legal system to make them more acceptable. Staying with the theme of women tavern-keepers, this time in eighteenth-century Poland, Jan Blonski presented a striking example of a symbol that could easily be lost in translation: explaining that paintings of the devil alongside female tavernkeepers did not signify their temptation of customers with alcohol (as might appear in nineteenth-century temperance art) but instead suggest dishonest dealings and cheating of their customers by, for example, overcharging. 

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Amy Rankine’s semiotic analysis of how beer is masculinised in David Lynch’s work also demonstrated the surprising pliancy of gendered symbols in translation from beer branding to cinematic characterisation to sensory experience (complete with a tasting of Wild Table Beer!).  

Wild Table Beer Tasting. Photograph by Emily Nicholls 

Finally, several papers took up the challenge of examining how our collective research on alcohol translates across disciplines and to broader publics. Geoffrey Hunt presented a sweeping analysis (co-authored with Alexandra Bogren and Margit Petersen) of the relative impact of studies on alcohol in the fields of anthropology and sociology across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, suggesting that sociological work on alcohol has had a much more productive and critical perspective on public health approaches than anthropology. Originally entitled “From “felicitous by-product” to “highly venerated arena:” Studying how the “Canon of Writing” in Anthropology and Sociology has Impacted Research on Alcohol and how this Research has Influenced the “Canon of Writing” in Each Discipline,” Hunt’s paper was undisputed winner of Best Title Slide in its revised form: 

“Why did I suggest presenting this paper” title slide. Photograph by Deborah Toner.  

Bel Lunnay also reflected on the question of research in translation, both in her own paper on balancing the intersections between social science and health epistemologies in writing about alcohol reduction for different audiences, and in her introduction to the DSN’s new AustralAsia research hub that she launched with co-host Ryo Yokoe. 

Introducing this exciting new international hub of the DSN, Bel and Ryo outlined their goals to provide a space for discussing multidisciplinary approaches to the theme of ‘Alcohol and Health in Context’, promote comparative, global and region-specific research on Australasia, and connect researchers across borders for future collaborative work. Their initial plan is to start with a biannual seminar programme featuring two speakers from each region (Asia and Oceania) on a shared topic but they were keen to stress that the hub is in the early stages of development and they want to hear from interested members how they can best shape the hub’s direction. 

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The DSN conferences have alternated productively between broad themes reflecting on the state of the field – this was the intention of 2021’s “Where are we Now?” and 2015’s “New Directions in Drinking Studies” – and more concentrated explorations of a theme. “Writing Alcohol” in 2024 thus mirrored 2018’s “Changing Drinking Cultures” and 2013’s “Biographies of Drink”. This conference also carried on the DSN’s legacy of fostering a collegial and congenial environment in which to discuss and debate key issues in alcohol studies in what was our first major in-person event since 2018. Pam Lock, Mark Hailwood and Sam Goodman’s expert knowledge of the food and drink scene in Bristol led to some superb social events, including a talk on wild beer brewing with Andy Hamilton, while Samantha Wilkinson, Graham Harding and Deborah Toner generously facilitated a space to discuss approaches to publishing in drinking studies at the conference close. And so it feels fitting to close this conference report, with the words of Kelly Sidgwick from Good Chemistry Brewery, who highlighted how this congenial atmosphere fostered productive discussions and networking: 

“As one of the few non-academic attendees at the conference, it was my privilege and pleasure to be included. The inter-panel discussions showed everyone’s interest in the wider subjects, not just their own areas, the after-hours talk was a lovely addition, and the break-time chats I had were just brilliant. As someone running businesses within the drinking industries, this allowed me to get a really different angle to my usual day-to-day, and make some relevant connections with interesting people.” 

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Mark Hailwood and Debbie Toner at the Conference Dinner. Photograph by Pam Lock

Please see the link for the DSN2024 Writing Alcohol programme