Young adults in Western countries are drinking more alcohol than ever before, particularly young women. This study aimed to explore how women are (re)defining their gender identities in relation to men through consumption of alcohol. Eight friendship discussion groups were conducted in Auckland, New Zealand, with 16 women and 16 men aged 20-29 years. Participants viewed binge drinking as a routine, normal part of everyday life. Women's drinking was linked to pleasure and fun, with positive descriptions of female participants who were frequently intoxicated. However, other drunk women were positioned as deviant and breaking traditional codes of femininity. Findings are discussed in terms of women's changing social positions and the accomplishment of gender identities through local communities of practice.

In contemporary society, being powerful is typically associated with, among other things, being male, middle class and employed. The cultural ascendancy of these characteristics is supported by specific structural and discursive patterns. However, there are a number of ways in which these cultural yardsticks can be challenged. In this paper we summarize the discursive patterns constructed by a group of working-class men experiencing long-term unemployment in a region of the English West Midlands. These men talked about a conflict between discourses concerning domestic provision and public consumption, leading to a sense of disempowerment and emasculation. Despite the potential challenge posed by long-term unemployment to traditional versions of masculinity, these men's accounts retained their positions within hegemonic discourses of masculinity. Finally, we examine the political implications of such discursive patterns.

The excessive and public consumption of alcohol with other men has been a traditional indication of manliness in Western cultures for many years. However, over the last two decades, this association has been eroded, in part through increased consumption by women. Within the gender‐relational context of this increase, we empirically explore ways in which particular (friendship) groups of young men and women (re)construct masculine identities. The male participants demonstrated greater discursive flexibility in enacting their gender identities through alcohol consumption compared with earlier NZ research although also greater constraints on change compared with more recent UK research. A minority of men constructed themselves as atypical in that they did not like rugby, beer or consuming vast quantities of alcohol. These men were all in professional occupations, and we speculate that their social class and financial status may enable them to negotiate alternative demonstrations of masculinity. We conclude that these findings could be explicated through an examination of national gendered identities that arose out of a pioneer culture, and the commodification of gender identities through alcohol consumption. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Men's health has been receiving increasing attention in recent years, both in the media and in academic literature. In February 1998 a British Sunday newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, ran a three-week special feature on 'A woman's guide to men's health'. Linguistic representations of health in popular media are revealing of social concerns regarding both the control of health and health care, therefore we critically analysed these texts using poststructuralist, discourse analytic techniques. Men's health was constructed as 'in crisis' and men tended to be aligned with culture (and work) and women with nature (and health). Paradoxically, certain traditional gender dichotomies were both challenged and reinforced within the texts. However, within the five patterns of discourse we identified (men's health in crisis, woman as nature/man as culture, the risk-taking superhero, man as infant and health for productivity), women's current position in society was negatively portrayed and functioned to persuade women that it is in their interests to be responsible for men's health, although without taking overt control. We conclude that the main representations of men's health for women in this series reinforce unequal social relations which does little to benefit women or men. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT We would like to thank Deborah Lupton and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

This study identifies some reasons why men with prostate disease may fail to seek medical care and has implications for increasing referral rates for men.

This study suggests that, like other men, male GPs may have ambivalent attitudes towards male self-referral and that this may influence their interactions with male patients.

This paper explores the ways in which male offenders in professionalstatus occupations prior to conviction construct and justifr moneyrelated crime. W e report a detailed analysis, based in grounded theory and critical social-psychological discourse analysis, of a loosely-structured group interview with four offenders. The men constructed justifications for their offenses in terms of "breadwinning" for their immediate family and economic responsibility toward their extended 'yamily " of employees and creditors.

When police officers interview people with intellectual disabilities who allege sexual assault and rape, they must establish rapport with the interviewee but deal with their distress in a way that does not compromise the interview’s impartiality and its acceptability in court. Inspection of 19 videotaped interviews from an English police force’s records reveals that the officers deal with expressed distress by choosing among three practices: minimal (e.g. okay) or no acknowledgement, acknowledging the expressed emotion as a matter of the complainant’s difficulty in proceeding (e.g. take your time) and rarely (and only if the complainants were apparently unable to resume their talk) explicit reference to their emotion (e.g. it’s obviously upsetting for you). We discuss these practices as ways of managing the conflicting demands of rapport and evidence-gathering.