Social Smoking: An Untenable Position

Social smokers manage the conflicting aspects of their liminal identities by negotiating complex roles of performance and exchange. Using a combination of methods, including both participant observation of cultural performances and informal interviews, to elicit lay theories and accounts of self-conscious practices, this project examines social actors, self-defined as nonsmokers (or reformed smokers), who engage in recreational tobacco use. Through in-depth interviews and observations of self-identified female social smokers, we document general characteristics of this subpopulation, sampled from a large Midwest capital and its surrounding areas. Social smokers occupy an untenable social space; as neither smokers nor nonsmokers, they use both practices and discourses about those practices to stake their claim to an untenable social position. We conclude with a theoretical discussion that compares our findings with other discourses on smoking, especially the discourse of addiction narratives. In an age of increasing awareness of the health consequences, smoking has become a culturally unavailable category producing “disconfirming realities” in which social smokers constantly renegotiate their status.