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Sociology 45(6) 977 -991 AbstractEntrenched conceptions of masculinity have constructed the male body as bounded and controlled. This article discusses the centrality of a particular construction of the male body to the phenomenon of British premarital stag party tourism to Eastern European cities. Drawing on data from participant-observation in Kraków, Poland, it is shown that the tour participants enact an embodied masculinity which is unruly and unrestrained. The stag tour experience is embodied through the use of clothing and incidences of nudity, public urination and vomiting, and the detrimental physical effects of heavy alcohol consumption. This embodiment is self-destructive and frequently self-parodic. The failures of participants to sustain a controlled and contained body are celebrated as part of the enactment of a boisterous masculinity. This represents a release from normative pressures concerning the male body but, with transgression being only temporary, also acts to support the ritualistic reinscription of a wider hegemonic masculinity.

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The cultural linkages between the drinking of alcohol and the assertion of masculinity have been well explored. In particular, drinking alcohol is still assumed to be a site where masculinity can be tested and proved. However, equally, drinking can be seen to undermine and discredit the male body. Further, older men's drinking practices are commonly overlooked. Through exploring two examples of cultural stereotypes relating to male drinking bodies, the lager lout and the real ale enthusiast, the article argues that persistent cultural assumptions about the appropriate way to embody masculinity. Both the lager lout and the bearded ale snob represent two alternative discourses of how alcohol undermines the bounded male body. Both cases exhibit a lack of control and restraint which is assumed to be desired of masculine bodies and, therefore, both become problematic and subject to social sanctions and cultural policing in the form of negative caricatured depictions. Finally, it is suggested that such stereotypes offer vivid examples of problematic male drinking bodies from which other embodiments can be normalised.

Recent years have seen changes in the practice of beer consumption, which appear to indicate raised standards of cultural prestige. This article focuses on the practice of Real Ale consumption, which has been promoted by the UK consumer pressure group, the Campaign for Real Ale, since 1971, and analyses how beer consumption has achieved an increased cultural position relative to understandings of taste and cultural capital. The article also draws on qualitative research, including interviews, archival material analysis and participant observation. Following recent advances in practice theories of consumption, the article identifies important changes in the materials, meanings and competencies of Real Ale consumption, which mean that a more complex 'intellectualised' form of beer appreciation has emerged over recent years. The article argues that by tracking these changes, it is possible to illustrate how cultural tastes and practices have undergone a process of 'embourgeoisement'. Specifically, exponents of Real Ale appreciation practices have borrowed from proximate practices, such as wine and food consumption, in seeking increased value. Beer consumption has become subjected to upward social mobility in becoming more complex and refined, meaning that it now functions more readily as a marker of social status. However, there is some suggestion that such a process of embourgeoisement has also generated antagonisms, with some consumers being excluded by discourses of taste and status.

There is a long academic tradition which positions the desire for authenticity as emerging as a symptom of dissatisfactions with modernity. Most recently, this has involved consumption of products that are valued for being authentic in contrast to mass produced commodities which are seen as being homogeneous, standardized and therefore inauthentic. A recent resurgence in interest in the idea of craft and craftwork has brought to the fore concerns about re-establishing connections between products, consumers and producers beyond rational market exchange. This research draws on interviews with 40 craft brewery and distillery workers to explore the ways in which authenticity is narrated as part of an ongoing effort to add value to their products and the contexts of their production. The article identifies six modes of authenticity which are drawn on in combination by participants to establish a narrative of authenticity. This is understood to be a clear illustration of the 'enrichment process' by which post-industrial economies manufacture value. A central element of craft drink producers' work is the marshalling of cultural value and engaging in communicative and performative acts that ascribe that value to products and the people involved in making them.

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The article reflects on the experience of conducting participatory research with all-male premarital stag tour groups in Krakow, Poland. The research therefore concerns the performative and embodied aspects of hegemonic male behaviour that are encouraged and enacted by the British men who take part in such tours. Vital to the process of gaining an ethnographic insight into the highly gendered leisure spaces of the stag tourism phenomenon was a willingness to centre sensory, emotional and embodied data in the research process. Methodological reflections, therefore, recall the effects of conducting research in a setting mediated by the consumption of alcohol and collective drunkenness and pervaded with sensory (the thump of nightclub bass speakers, the drunken cheers of stag group participants, the smell of vodka) and emotive (feelings of elation, amusement and disgust) stimuli. Particular importance can be given to the benefit of mutual ‘common-sense’ experiences in building rapport between researchers and their participants. Such insights are of considerable epistemological value. In closing the article it is suggested that learning to recognise and work with such aspects of the research process is vital in developing effective research competencies.