Working the Boundaries of Care: A Narcofeminist Analysis of Alcohol Consumption Practices among Nurses and Midwives in Australia

Public health research reports “alarming” levels of “risky,” or even “hazardous,” alcohol consumption among the female-dominated and historically-feminized professions of nursing and midwifery. Accounts of these practices presuppose alcohol as inherently harmful and largely enact the drinking of nurses and midwives as a maladaptive response to “cope” with the demands of a high-stress occupation. Relaying a boundary of acceptable/unacceptable and healthy/harmful responses to professional demands, we argue that such accounts minimize or erase agency and pleasure while simultaneously reiterating familiar gendered discourses of women as vulnerable. Mobilizing a narcofeminist approach that attends to the creative, liberatory, and life-affirming possibilities of psychoactive substance consumption, we analyze data drawn from interviews with 25 nurses and midwives about drinking with their colleagues. In a workforce shaped by gendered expectations of comportment and care, and normative notions of health, we examine how nurses and midwives negotiate and navigate multiple boundaries—healthy and harmful, professional and personal, appropriate practices of care, and expectations of femininity and motherhood—through and with alcohol. Centering the above tensions, our analysis illuminates how drinking together with colleagues fosters camaraderie and solidarity, plays a supportive and productive role in nurturing professional relationships and, more broadly, can be liberating and generative of a life well-lived. In conclusion, we argue that rather than reducing the drinking of nurses and midwives to a maladaptive and straightforwardly harmful effort to “cope” with work, it is better understood as part of work itself.