Speeches by Young University Students on Alcohol Consumption: A Reading from a Gender Perspective

Abstract

The phenomenon of alcohol consumption in young people has been closely related to the cultural and social, this complexity means that its approach is given from different perspectives and one of them is the study from the gender perspective that guides the present study. The objective was to identify, from a gender perspective, the senses and meanings of alcohol consumption among young health science students. Socio-hermeneutic discourse analysis was used, from which the dialectical sense unit of control in alcohol consumption originated. This unit is based on five dimensions of control that weave dialectical relationships and are the interpretive axis: Being under control (implies the participation of an external gaze that monitors normative and stereotyped behaviors for being a man and for being a woman); Getting out of control (it is related to an internal look that can call for the breaking of stereotypes) Self-control (recognition of one's own limits regarding consumption); Not being in self-control (the need to get back under control when alcohol is consumed in excess) and Re-being under control (go back to complying with what is regulated or what is under surveillance by the external gaze); which are part of the ways in which young university participants, both men and women, recover, relate and signify and give meaning to the diversity of situations of alcohol consumption and how these are part of the way of subjecting themselves.