strippoker!theydon’tshownothing!positioningidentities.docVIP

“Strip Poker! They Don’t Show Nothing!’” Positioning identities in adolescent male talk about a television game show Neill Korobov Michael Bamberg Neill Korobov Michael Bamberg Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology Clark University Clark University Worcester, MA, USA Worcester, MA, USA Email: Nkorobov@ Email: Mbamberg@ 508.421.4744 508.793.7135 Submitted to Date “Strip Poker! They don’t show nothing’” Positioning identities in adolescent male talk about a television game show Abstract The purpose of this article is to approach male ‘identities’ as highly interactive and empirical phenomena that occur in talk. In talk, identities are approached as occasioned conversational resources that are locally and rhetorically constructed. Further, we conceptualize ‘identities’ as ‘interactional identities’ that are employed by interactants in situ, not as one identity here and then another identity there, but as a complex weaving of ‘positionings’. As such, we will apply the discursive notion of ‘positions’ and ‘positioning’ in order to examine how a group of 10-11 year old boys work up their identities during a stretch of ‘naturally-occurring’ talk about seeing female nudity on a television game show. Our argument is that their identities are best viewed as a confluence of positionings—as ‘masculine’, ‘heterosexual’, ‘childish’, and as ‘consumer critics’. Most importantly, we will show how these positionings are crafted in less than fully obvious, direct, or self-incriminating ways. By doing such mitigation, the boys are able to do two things simultaneously: They are able to 1) hedge their commitment to ‘hetero-normative masculinity’, particularly to those features that may suggest shallowness, chauvinism, or sexism, while 2) displaying a clear interest in ‘heterosexual desire’. Key words: Identities, talk, discourse, positioning, masculinity, heterosexuality, adolescence, gen