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Title:
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Games People Play: The linguistic construction of gender and sexuality in Spanish and English internet chats
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Author:
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Marisol del-Teso-Craviotto
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Cornell University
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2004
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Discourse Analysis
Sociolinguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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English
Spanish
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Director(s):
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Sally McConnell-Ginet
Hongyin Tao
M. Suner
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Abstract:
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Dating chat rooms are social spaces where apparently disembodied language is the primary medium in which gender and sexual desire, both widely viewed as based on biological bodies, are enacted. This dissertation investigates how participants use linguistic and other resources available online to give bodily substance to their identities and interactions and how they balance the constraints of public interaction with the pursuit of normatively private erotic pleasures. Three half-hour conversations each from five English and four Spanish chat rooms were analyzed following conversation analytic methodologies with a critical/feminist perspective. Chats observed included those aimed at heterosexuals of different ages, at lesbians, and at gay men.
In all chat rooms except the two aimed at gay men, participants often engaged in overtly erotic conversations. They did so, however, playfully and humorously, using a set of unspoken conventions about chatting that is negotiated interactionally. This play repertoire is characterized by highly informal language, para-linguistic features such as laughter, humorous appropriations, and interactions through alter personae. Such playfulness enhances participants' pleasure while allowing them to maintain critical distance. Although tending to promote stereotypical and superficial expressions of desire, the play repertoire nevertheless helps chats fulfill important social and emotional needs.
Even though chat rooms are arguably body-free spaces where the absence of visual and aural cues restricts the possibility of materiality, participants invoke gendered and sexual bodies to sustain erotic engagement. Participants use descriptions, the age/sex/location schema, paralinguistic features, screen names, and alter personae to create discursive bodies that resolve this paradox of disembodied eroticism and break up the boundaries between virtual and material spaces.
Precisely how humor and playfulness are realized linguistically is culturally specific as are approaches to invoking bodies. Even though the technology and many communicative conventions are transnational, chat rooms based in the US used somewhat different strategies from those based in Spain, with participants drawing on their own expectations and culturally familiar patterns of interaction.
Dating chats are distinctive environments. Nonetheless, this research can help analysts better understand other kinds of computer-mediated communication and also other aspects and contexts of the interaction of language, sexuality, and desire.
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