15.2891, Diss: Discourse Analysis: del-Teso-Craviotto: 'Games...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-15-2891. Wed Oct 13 2004. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 15.2891, Diss: Discourse Analysis: del-Teso-Craviotto: 'Games...'                                                                                                                                                      

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1)
Date: 11-Oct-2004
From: Marisol del-Teso-Craviotto < deltesm at muohio.edu >
Subject: Games People Play: The Linguistic Construction of Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and English Internet Chats 
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 18:10:00
From: Marisol del-Teso-Craviotto < deltesm at muohio.edu >
Subject: Games People Play: The Linguistic Construction of Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and English Internet Chats 
 
Institution: Cornell University 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2004 

Author: Marisol del-Teso-Craviotto

Dissertation Title: Games People Play: The Linguistic Construction of Gender
and Sexuality in Spanish and English Internet Chats 

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics 

Subject Language(s):
English (Code: ENG) 
Spanish (Code: SPN) 


Dissertation Director(s):
Sally McConnell-Ginet
Margarita Suñer
Hongyin Tao

Dissertation Abstract:

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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