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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1068

Part of Session 182: Gender ideologies in public discourses (Other abstracts in this session)

”A bit too skinny for me”: Homosocial constructions of heterosexual desire in offline-online interaction

Authors: Mortensen, Kristine Køhler
Submitted by: Mortensen, Kristine Køhler (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Analysts have demonstrated that adolescents – when entering the heterosexual market – can engage in two different roles: as commodity or as broker (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003, Kothoff 2008). The negotiation is so to speak not merely constituted by two persons – a man and a woman – but also includes subsidiary participants who co-act in the process of constructing certain persons as acceptable and attractive objects of desire. Homosocial constructions of desire have primarily been examined among adolescent groups in offline settings (Eckert 1996, Georgakapoulou 2008) and in literary studies (Sedgwick 1985). As the Internet is becoming a key social context for people seeking romantic partners, the question of how subsidiary participants take part in online flirtation emerges.

Based on audiovisual recordings in Danish of heterosexual female friends who sit in front of a computer and together engage in online dating activities, this presentation shows how virtual male objects are jointly constructed and evaluated as desirable or non-desirable. Using the screen tracking software, Hypercam, the present paper investigates online heterosexual activities on Internet dating sites in relation to simultaneous offline homosocial interaction. The recordings give a new and direct insight into the interrelations between online and offline modes by showing how acts within social media are both evaluated and initiated through offline interaction.

Interactional analysis demonstrates how the women, by explicitly evaluating the physical appearance and sexual attraction of the male objects, negotiate and reconstruct stereotypical gender roles through the positioning of themselves as agentive subjects in the dating act. At the same time the humorous and sometimes disparaging evaluations function as common entertainment and strengthening of the offline homosocial relation.

References
Eckert, Penelope (1996): Vowels and nailpolish: The emergence of linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace. In: Alers, Jocelyn et al (ed.): Gender and belief systems. Berkeley: Berkeley woman and language group.
Eckert, Penelope & Sally McConnell-Ginet (2003): Language and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Georgakapoulou (2008): Positioning in style: Men in women’s jointly produced stories. In: Auer, Peter (ed.): Language, Power and Social Process: Style and Social Identities: Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kotthoff, Helga (2008): Konversationelle Verhandlungen des romantischen Marktes. Adoleszente Freundinnen am Telefon. In: Jugendsprache – Youth Language. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism. Vol. 42.
Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky (1985): Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.