The sober self, sisterhood, and non-drinking practices: a feminist ethnography of women’s recovery culture within online sobriety communities

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of ‘online sobriety communities’: peer-to-peer support groups, hosted on Social Networking Sites (SNS), that assist individuals to change their drinking behaviours. These are predominantly founded by women, marketed to women, and attract a predominantly female membership, but have hitherto been largely overlooked by academic research.

This PhD thesis is a pragmatist feminist ethnography that draws on my positionality as an intimate insider researcher to construct a conceptual, emergent, grounded theory that informs understanding of how the recovery culture within online sobriety communities assists women to navigate sobriety. Data informing this is collected through participant interviews, digital and material ethnographic observations, and public content posted on Instagram. Analysis was subsequently conducted using a constructivist grounded theoretical approach.

Findings from this PhD research project identify three key processes through which women ‘do’ sobriety within the recovery culture of online sobriety communities, being: the embodiment and construction of a ‘sober self’; the formation of a ‘sober sisterhood’; and, the development of ‘non-drinking practices’, wherein tensions regarding women’s bodies, feminism(s), and recovery capital reside.

This feminist ethnography prioritises women’s voices to inform understanding of women’s sex- and gender-based experiences of sobriety, and in doing so positions the non-drinking woman as an ‘insider’ to shared practices of self-formation, feminism, and community. It provides a deep and detailed understanding of online sobriety communities through layers of description and analysis that could be useful for future studies, recovery modalities, government strategies, and women who (want to) use these communities to change their drinking behaviours.