Inscribing Alcohol Realities: Gender Dualism in Researcher Accounts of Night-Time Violence

In public debate about gender inequality and violence, gender is frequently framed as an ideological construct in competition with more amenable, material drivers. This paper examines how such representations are produced, analyzing the performative effects of a sex−gender dualism in interviews with alcohol policy researchers discussing “alcohol-fueled violence” in the night-time economy. Demarcating the natural and the social, this “inscription device” stabilizes the individual body as a container for gendered personhood, privileging assumptions about the pharmacological effects of alcohol, and the moderating influence of various social factors. Although presented as objective, these scientific practices foreground alcohol as the primary cause of violence, and downplay the contribution of men and masculinities. We argue that public health approaches to gender equity, grounded in binary biological distinctions, risk not only marginalizing gender analysis, but constituting sex and other objects as more materially and evidentially “real” in research and policy debates.