Lubrication and domination : beer, sport, masculinity, and the Australian gender order

![CDATA[Advertising campaigns for Australian beer brands reveal the significant role of beer in the cultural construction and promotion of Australian national identity and masculinity. The iconographic representations and thematic concerns utilized within Australian alcohol promotional culture have proved remarkably durable­ persistently reproducing dominant discourses of masculine power, Anglo-Celtic predominance, feminine exclusion or exploitation, nationalistic sporting prowess and masculinist "workerism." The promotion of alcohol has heavily deployed stereotypical representations, with beer, in particular, linked to the performance of Australian lifestyle rituals (Fiske, Hodge, & Turner, 1987). These recurring discourses reveal a stubborn and outmoded tendency within Australian beer commercials to promote archaic depictions of a homogeneous national identity in which gender, race, and ethnic representations are either essentialized or excluded wholesale - while sociocultural change, contestation, or resistance are rarely addressed or acknowledged. Alcohol is naturalized within these commercials as an essential everyday lifestyle accoutrement, with its consumption portrayed as an almost mandatory habit within Australian leisure.]]