'Not a good look':Impossible dilemmas for young women negotiating the culture of intoxication in the UK.

This paper investigates young women’s alcohol consumption in the UK within a widespread culture of intoxication in relation to recent debates about post-feminism and contemporary femininity. Young women are faced with an ‘impossible dilemma’, arising from the contradiction between a hedonistic discourse of alcohol consumption and post-feminist discourse around attaining and maintaining the ‘right’ form of hyper-sexual heterosexual femininity. Drawing on a recent interview study with 24 young white working-class and middle-class women in the South-West of England, we explore how young women inhabit the dilemmas of contemporary femininity in youth drinking cultures, striving to achieve the ‘right’ form of hyper-sexual femininity and an ‘optimum’ level of drunkenness