GENDER: FEMININITY
GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT ON THE
FEMININITY TIGHTROPE
The girls’ night out is projected as fun – but navigating the rules
of engagement can challenge even the most socially savvy.
Heading to the pub after work
to catch up with friends and
colleagues and vent about
the more curious spectacles
that may have taken place in the day is
an activity familiar to millions of workers
around the world. But for Dr Emily Nicholls
it’s not an after-work excursion, it’s her
laboratory. Not surprisingly, the research
can be quite discombobulating. That’s a
good word for what Dr Nicholls studies –
Western drinking culture.
Dr Nicholls is a senior lecturer in
sociology and has a particular interest in
dissecting the complex mix of perceptions,
interactions and behaviours that collectively
constitute femininity as performed
inebriated versus sober, including when in
the setting of a ‘girls’ night out’.
“I wanted to understand how we reflect
our gender and femininity through the lens
of alcohol consumption or – for some of
us – sobriety,” Dr Nicholls says.
It’s important to note that she is not
referring to biological sex, describing
gender instead as an identity that is socially
constructed and something that we ‘do’ or
‘perform’. She says this is a “fluid trait” that
is laid over the sex assigned at birth.
Gender is a hot research topic precisely
because of this fluidity, which has allowed
cultural norms to encode rules and roles
into the feminine and the masculine. An
example is risk aversion being associated
with femininity and risk-taking with
masculinity. To analyse this coding,
Dr Nicholls focuses her research lens onto
drinking and sobriety cultures in the UK.
Her findings are summarised in a book
titled Negotiating Femininities in the
Neoliberal Night-time Economy: Too Much
of a Girl?, which was published in 2019 by
Palgrave Macmillan.
Based on interviews with 18 to 25-yearolds,
the study involved recruiting 26
young women to share their experiences
of a typical girls’ night out in an interview
with the researcher, a methodology that
attracted willing volunteers.
The balancing act
Dr Nicholls found that the projection of
femininity in these scenarios had three
particular traits: glammed up ‘girliness’,
alcohol consumption, and risk management.
The latter related primarily to dangerous
levels of alcohol consumption and concerns
over sexual harassment.
Each trait was found to exist on a ‘too
little, just enough and too much’ Goldilocks
spectrum. For example, when it comes
to drinking, risk management was based
on consumption being enough to be fun,
sociable and ‘one of the girls’ but not
enough to become ill, to be perceived to
put oneself ‘at risk’ or to appear unladylike
through, for example, losing control and
vomiting in public. Similarly, glamming up is
a prerequisite, but only to a level sufficient
to be noticed without courting unwanted
sexual attention and without looking too
‘overdone’ or like someone who has ‘tried
too hard’.
Peers and other women on the night out
were found to participate in enforcing and
policing the ‘just right’ standards, which
can vary in ways that are also influenced by
social backgrounds.
“That points to femininity being full of
contradictions, making it difficult to embody
and it results in women feeling like they
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ISSUE 1 / 2020