Displacements of gender: Research on alcohol, violence and the night-time economy

‘Alcohol-related violence’, especially among young people participating in the night-time economy (NTE), has been the subject of intense public and policy debate in Australia. Previous sociological work has highlighted the relationship between men, masculinities and violence, but this relationship has received little attention in the research that tends to garner policy attention. In this article, we focus on the treatment of gender in Australian quantitative research on alcohol and violence in the NTE. We identify four ‘gendering practices’ through which such research genders alcohol and violence: de-gendering alcohol and violence through obscuring gender differences; displacing men and masculinities via a focus on environmental, geographical and temporal factors; rendering gender invisible via methodological considerations; and addressing gender in limited ways. We argue that these research practices and the policy recommendations that flow from them reproduce normative understandings of alcohol effects and lend support to gendered forms of power.