Narcofeminist affects: Gender, harm and fun in young women and gender diverse people’s experiences of alcohol and other drug consumption

While much sociological research suggests that gender dynamics can make alcohol and other drug consumption settings potentially unsafe, these practices can still be highly pleasurable and meaningful for young people. Analysis of influential understandings of young people’s alcohol and other drug consumption highlights how the notion of ‘harm’ is gendered, with men and masculinity rarely addressed, while women are constituted as uniquely vulnerable. Mobilising a concurrent focus on harms and benefits inspired by narcofeminisms and analysing qualitative interviews with 22 young women and gender diverse people, we examine what they find appealing and concerning about alcohol and other drugs, and how they navigate these dual forces in their consumption practices. Our analysis centres affective dynamics to examine how these practices can form part of meaningful modes of living in a world shaped by persistent concerns about the threat of gendered violence. Our participants characterise the conduct of men as central concerns during consumption events. However, their accounts also highlight the affective appeal of alcohol and other drug consumption in relation to experiencing social connections, embodied pleasures and new ways of being and doing in the world. In navigating this nexus of risk and reward, these young people describe efforts to maximise the generative potential of consumption while minimising the harms that men’s conduct can pose. We argue that responses to young people’s alcohol and other drug consumption could be productively informed by a narcofeminist politics that considers not only the reduction of harm but the desire to live well.