Recovering alcoholic: Competing construals of a socially constructed identity category

Abstract

This paper examines the competing construals of the phrase recovering alcoholic, which, as a Membership Categorization Device (Sacks 1992), serves to fulfill a commitment to an identity category and at the same time evokes other category-bound activities, often with unintended consequences. Former problem drinkers are routinely referred to by themselves and others as recovering alcoholics, yet they are not ‘recovering’ in the canonical sense of the word, and they participate in a behavior – not drinking – which is a negation of the behavior that originally qualified them as alcoholics. This use of the relatively new identity marker recovering alcoholic may discourage a problem drinker from attempting sobriety, as it implies an unbounded, never-ending period of recovery, unlike recovery from other diseases (and, oddly, unlike the full recovery proffered by Alcoholics Anonymous).