ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of how class and gender have been theorised in young people's drinking cultures across different countries. The concept of class is multifaceted and is generally understood as a means of positioning and classifying (young) people. The chapter considers how recent moral panics over young people's public drinking are often highly gendered and class-specific, problematising certain social groups of young people as 'flawed consumers' and 'at risk' groups. At present there is a small yet growing body of research exploring the gendered nature of young people's drinking cultures, but there is very little work exploring how gender intersects with social class. Even fewer studies have explored how gender and class play out in young people's online drinking cultures. The chapter shows that recent research is beginning to investigate the classed and gendered dimensions of youth drinking cultures on- and offline.
