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This report presents a summary of findings and recommendations from an international comparative research project on the treatment of gender in research and policy on alcohol-related violence among young people in Australia, Canada and Sweden.

Analysis of alcohol policy suggests women are marked out for special attention while men and masculinities are often ignored. In this paper, we employ Carol Bacchi’s work on ‘gendering practices’ and John Law’s concept of ‘collateral realities’ to examine how gender is constituted in Australian alcohol policy. For Bacchi, policies actively produce what it is possible for ‘men’ and ‘women’ to become. For Law, realities are constituted through methodological instruments and representational practices. We analyze the making of three collateral realities in Australian alcohol policy: gender as an individual attribute; gender as a synonym for women; and gender as confined to the domestic sphere. These collateral realities contribute to the maintenance of binary notions of gender and reinforce a straightforwardly causal role for alcohol in harms, including violence. Attention to the political effects of these ‘realities’ should be prioritized in the development of more equitable responses to alcohol and harm.

‘Alcohol-fuelled violence’ and its prevention has been the subject of recent intense policy debate in Australia, with the content of this debate informed by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. In particular, given the well-established relationship between masculinities and violence, the meagre attention paid to the role of gender in alcohol research and policy recommendations stands out as a critical issue. In this article, which draws on recent work in feminist science studies and science and technology studies, we focus on the treatment of gender, alcohol and violence in Australian research on ‘alcohol-related presentations’ to emergency departments (EDs), analysing this type of research because of its prominence in policy debates. We focus on four types of ‘gendering practice’ through which research genders ‘alcohol-related presentations’ to EDs: omitting gender from consideration, ignoring clearly gendered data when making gender-neutral policy recommendations, methodologically designing out gender and addressing gender in terms of risk and vulnerability. We argue that ED research practices and their policy recommendations reproduce normative understandings of alcohol's effects and of the operations of gender in social arrangements, thereby contributing to the ‘evidence base’ supporting unfair policy responses.