Threats of Pleasure and Chaos: Wine and Gendered Social Order

This chapter focuses on women’s relations with wine, both in past societies and today, issues which also tell us about men’s relations with both women and wine. Throughout history, female consumption of wine has frequently been associated with chaos and female pleasure in wine viewed as threatening to patriarchal socio-cultural formations. Women’s wine drinking has been subject to markedly more socio-cultural regulation; it has been surrounded by more and stricter taboos; it has been particularly framed in terms of essentialising gendered stereotypes; the symbolic and physical spaces in which it happens have been more circumscribed; women’s wine-relevant agency has been more restricted and more negatively framed; and there have been more dramatic moral panics about female wine drinking. These longstanding patterns are shown to continue into present-day societies, as well as mutating in distinctive ways today.