Gendered Expectations, Gatekeeping, and Consumption in Craft Beer Spaces

Abstract

While women are drinking more craft beer in the United States, the association between masculinity and beer remains intact. Yet sparse research has considered how involvement in craft beer culture may differ across public and elite beer spaces. Public spaces are open settings such as bars or breweries, and elite settings are more closed settings such as bottle shares and beer clubs. In this article, we analyze a questionnaire of 1,102 craft beer drinkers to compare the ways that men and women gain and enact cultural legitimacy within different craft beer spaces. Our focus on public and elite consumption spaces generates two interconnected insights. First, in public spaces, men are assumed to have a natural basic beer knowledge. Women, however, are dismissed as “not real beer drinkers” through men’s gatekeeping. Second, within elite spaces, both men and women must prove their belonging as elite drinkers and ultimately navigate gatekeeping mechanisms. As a result, our work extends consumption and gender literature by showing how inclusive cultural movements rest on the gendering of contextually specific knowledge and the policing of elite status and prestige in public and elite leisure spaces.