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This paper critically examines competing media discourses about women’s alcohol consumption as spectators at the Melbourne Cup, a historically prestigious annual Australian horse race. Taking a feminist poststructural lens, this paper identifies how print media representations of the female drinking subject can provide a multitude of subject positions that can be contradictory and subversive, offering possibilities for resistance to idealised middle-class gendered norms about women and drinking. This paper provides new insights into print media portrayals of “unruly” female spectators and their alcohol consumption at public events such as the Melbourne Cup. Refereed/Peer-reviewed