Women and alcohol: Social perspectives sets into motion a debate about how gendering works in the alcohol field and demonstrates that gendersensitive knowledge production allows us to move forward effectively. Contributors choose deliberately to show how we are able to transform our epistemologies, knowledge, paradigms, discourses, notions and practices which are capable of being transformed. Contributors demonstrate that we need ‘to revision’ which means ‘letting go of how we have seen in order to construct new perceptions’ (Clarke and Olesen, 1999, p 3). Women and alcohol: Social perspectives underlines the need to let go of any damaging, prejudicial, unjust, outdated images and ideas about women who use or ‘misuse’ alcohol, in order to construct new insights and theories about women's alcohol using, gendered experiences.

Given the book's focus on a social model, it takes a revisioning stance which makes the book quite distinctive. A great effort is made to politicise the issue of women and alcohol as well as to detach this issue from a rigid, medical model. An unstated assumption embedded in all chapters is that helping to create a society which is difference centred and which acknowledges the marginality of women alcohol ‘misusers’ is needed. The consequence of this assumption is that these authors are able to cast doubt on normative beliefs and practices that are shaped in both marginalised and privileged spaces. They want to make those who hold these normative beliefs feel uncomfortable as well as to affect changes that are structural, relational and cultural.

Related to this discussion, the disease regimes of addiction and their related knowledge making practices in research and treatment have made the field resistant to gendered, classed and racialised power differentials that structure the lives of drug and alcohol using women (Campbell and Ettorre, 2011). Without knowledge of these power differentials what we need to know about women's specific needs will continue not to be known. Here, feminist or gender sensitive knowledge production is a promising route for overcoming pervasive ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ (Tuana, 2006) that prevails in these particular disease regimes of addiction. In the context of examining the women's health movement, Tuana (2006) contends that this resistance movement was concerned not only with the circulation of knowledge but also ignorance.