Three half-hour conversations each from five English and four Spanish dating chat rooms were analyzed following conversation analytic methodologies. Participants in the chats often engaged in playful and humorous erotic conversations, using a set of interactionally negotiated conventions about chatting that constitute a play frame, characterized linguistically by graphemic representations of laughter, appropriations, reproduction of a humorous pronunciation, and interactions through alter personae. Such playfulness enhances participants' pleasure while allowing them to maintain critical distance, and balances the constraints of public interaction with the pursuit of private erotic pleasures. This study contributes to our understanding of the social and discursive dimension of sexuality, going beyond issues of sexual identity and focusing on the conversational negotiation of eroticism and desire.
This study examines how racist and xenophobic discourses of Spanish elite groups are appropriated and contested in an Internet forum for Argentines in Spain. Specifically, I examine the discursive strategies involved in the identification of the in-group and the out-group (Spanish citizens vs immigrants), the descriptions of the social actors, and the stances adopted by the participants in the forum, three dimensions that have been found to be key in the production of xeno-racist discourses. The results show that this group of forum participants aligns with the racist and anti-racist ideologies articulated in political debates and the mass media in Spain, thus providing evidence of racist and xenophobic discourses working in a top-down fashion. At the same time, however, the analysis offers an example of how the discourses of dominant social groups can be challenged and reformulated to serve the purposes of the subordinate social groups.
In this article, I investigate the linguistic practices by which participants in online dating chats become authentic gendered and sexual beings in the virtual world. This process of authentication validates them as members of a specific gender or sexual group, which is a key prerequisite for engaging in the intricacies of online desire and eroticism. Authentication in this context is necessarily a discursive act because of the absence of visual or aural cues, and it takes place through linguistic strategies such as the age/sex/location schema, descriptions of the self, and screen names. The resulting gender and sexual identities are sketches or stereotypes whose value derives from the acceptance of social and cultural discourses on gender and sexuality that are negotiated in the interactions. Authentication, therefore, is not an external process imposed upon people, but the result of specific social practices.
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