Justine Coupland

Small Talk: Social Functions

Volume 36, Number1, 2003 Contents: J. Coupland, Small Talk: Social Functions. J. Thornborrow, The Organization of Primary School Childrens On-Task and Off-Task Talk in a Small Group Setting. M. McCarthy, Talking Back: Small Interactional Response Tokens in Everyday Conversation. J. Holmes, Small Talk at Work: Potential Problems for workers With an Intellectual Disability. J. Coupland, A. Jaworski, Transgression and Intimacy in Recreational Talk Narratives.

Gendered discourses on the ‘problem’ of ageing: consumerized solutions

Contemporary consumer culture sees the body as the crucial indicator of the self and apparent bodily ageing as problematic. All bodies age, but how is evidence of ageing culturally interpreted? This article develops a critical-pragmatic analysis of consumerized body discourses, with particular focus on the semiotics of the visibly ageing face, in the context of lifestyle magazine features and advertisements on skin care. Such texts work to equate ageing with the look of ageing, problematize ageing appearance, and offer marketized solutions to the ‘problem’ of ageing, using markedly gendered strategies. Texts aimed at a female market project skin care as a serious issue, pathologize the look of ageing, offer highly technologized solutions, and naturalize surgical intervention. The (newer) male market is being discursively engaged by strategies designed to normalize male investment in products and processes traditionally seen as in the domain of female bodily grooming. Consumerized male narcissism is enabled by ironic, ‘uncommitted’ discourses, the use of highly masculinized images and text, and, more recently, discourses which draw attention to the salience of the female appraising gaze.

Articulations of Same-sex Desire: Lesbian and Gay Male Dating Advertisements

A survey of self and other categorisation in 200 lesbian and gay male dating advertisement texts, taken from current magazines and newspapers, reveals the discursive means by which homosexual advertisers in our corpus commodify and market sexual/self-gendered identities. Detailed analysis of a sub-sample of the advertisements allows us to trace the discourse processes and conventions used in formulating identity in such texts. We interpret these discourse practices in relation to a social critique of gay attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles. The different conventions for self-commodification followed by lesbians and gay men in this survey suggest generalisable differences in sexual stance and cultural identification

Othering in gossip: “you go out you have a laugh and you can pull yeah okay but like…”:

It has been claimed that gossip allows participants to negotiate aspects of group membership, and the inclusion and exclusion of others, by working out shared values. This article examines instances of gossipy storytelling among young friends during which participants negotiate self- and other-identities in particular ways. Participants are found to share judgments not only about others behavior but also about their own behavior through particular processes of othering. A range of discursive strategies place the characters in gossip-stories (even in the category called self-gossip) in marginalized, liminal, or uncertain social spaces. In the gossipy talk episodes examined, social transgression might be oriented to as a serious matter and thus pejorated, or oriented to in a playful key and thus celebrated. This ambiguity Do we disapprove or approve, of this bad behavior? - means that in negotiating the identity status of gossipees liminality is constant. It is argued that othering, as an emergent category, along with the particular discursive strategies that achieve it, is an aspect of gossip that deserves further attention. (Gossip, stories, self- and other-identities, othering, liminality)*

Time, the body and the reversibility of ageing : commodifying the decade

ABSTRACT Contemporary popular culture proposes new ideological associations between time, ageing, the body and personal identity projects. In a range of magazine texts, television shows and associated websites, several commercialised discourses equate ageing, and womens ageing in particular, with the ‘look’ of ageing. They project a version of personal ageing that is reversible and repairable, on the presumption that looking younger is universally a desirable goal and one that can be reached through regimes of control operating on skin, body shape and weight, hair and clothing. Different moral stances are established in these discourses. One set offers magazine readers putative control over acknowledged risks and threats deemed inherent to ageing. Such texts invoke personal responsibility for maintaining and indeed for re-claiming a youthful appearance in middle and old age. Another set shames and vilifies people who ‘look older than they should’. In those cases, visible ageing needs to be urgently dealt with, on the gerontophobic assumption that the look of ageing renders the individual progressively less socially desirable or even less acceptable. Different frames of mediation, such as the keying of personal censure and humiliation as play, complicate the moral critique of these discourses, even though their ageist orientations are often stark. The decade is constructed as an important unit of bodily ageing, when the target is to look or in some ways to be ‘ten years younger’.

Conflicting discourses, shifting ideologies: pharmaceutical, `alternative' and feminist emancipatory texts on the menopause

This article uses a close pragmatic analysis to examine three discourses of the menopause, each with identifiably different health and lifespan ideologies, each used to further its own set of economic and/or political agendas. We argue that these texts have potentially powerful influential effects on womens interpretations of their own `change of life. Discourse 1 (the `pharmaceutical discourse) is represented by pharmaceutical brochures, which construct the menopause as medical `pathology caused by physiological decrement and generally advocate correcting or suppressing symptoms by `treatment with hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Discourse 2 (the `alternative therapy discourse) as represented in popular printed media texts, rejects both subjection to medical/pharmaceutical intervention, and many of the claims made for HRT, and recommends that women take personal and active `control by using `natural remedies and making lifestyle adjustments. Although in ideological conflict, both these discourses are arguably ageist in their reproduction of negative perceptions of menopause. Discourse 3 (the emancipatory feminist discourse) reconstructs the menopause as a positively significant rite of passage — a time of re-evaluation and new-found freedom. Like Discourse 2, feminist discourse rejects the medicalization of menopause and the claims Discourse 1 makes for HRT. But, in addition, Discourse 3 rejects the dominant medical view of the cultural meaning of menopause, with the end of menstruation entextualized as gain, rather than loss, and redefines female midlife as a time of new freedom, wisdom and personal insight.

Talking about Generation X: Defining Them as They Define Themselves

In response to a recent explosion of media attention to so-called Generation X, the authors investigated youngpeoplesresponses to media constructions of this generational category label. Twenty-six volunteers aged 19-23 participated in six audiotaped focus group discussions A discourse analytic perspective enables the authors to explore how these young participants worked together to negotiate their generational identity and their position in the life span vis-a-vis other generational groups. The respondents talk uses personal accounts to reject the negative media stereotypes of Generation X, yet reveals that the media may be one of the defining characteristics of their generational identity. The analysis also reveals themes of out-group denigration and blame, which are interpreted as indicative of the intergroup processes triggered when groups are identified and made salient.

Discourse, identity and change in mid-to-late life: interdisciplinary perspectives on language and ageing

ABSTRACT The papers in this special issue contribute to the growing body of research on sociolinguistic and discursive interpretations of mid and later life by investigating some of the identity affordances and constraints associated with ‘being middle-aged’ or ‘being old’. The papers here offer qualitative, contextually based analyses of a broad range of data and use various methodological and theoretical perspectives: narrative theory, critical pragmatics, social theory and discursive psychology. The main focus is on the ways in which change impacts on the ageing individual, and how this change is discursively interpreted and negotiated both by and for or about individuals in diverse social frames. We examine age and change as they interact with personal and social identity in personal diary accounts, in print, on the television and web media, in conversations amongst friends and acquaintances, in interviews and during storytelling. Language and communication are examined as resources for making and interpreting the meanings of ageing, at both the macro (societal) and micro (individual and inter-personal) levels.

Transgression and intimacy in recreational talk narratives

Potentially transgressive or unsafe narrative themes offer a means of achieving intimacy among speakers. We examine 3 extracts from leisure-time conversations among different groups of young friends, where stories are told on topics that are conventionally considered rude or risqué-the defiling of food, vomiting, and watching animals having sex. The analysis shows how speakers in various ways negotiate their own local orientations to the status of topics-as transgressive but talkable-and how participants build rapport through their shared alignment to and enjoyment of transgression. Talk is established as playfully open and permissive through focus on rude topics. Although such newsworthy and high-involvement narratives diverge radically from prototypical small talk, viewed as phatic communion, they nevertheless meet some of its core criteria-the use of ritualized sequences, the strengthening of relational ties, and low commitment to veracity.

Egg Seeks Sperm. End of Story...? Articulating Gay Parenting in Small Ads for Reproductive Partners:

Gay men and lesbians place small advertisements in the gay press to find reproductive partners. Analyses of over 200 such `mating ads reveal that advertisers use a range of discursive methods to manage the potential gay parenting identities. We examine how gay male and lesbian advertisers adapt the formulaic format of the classified ad by exploiting the intertextual resonance of the job ad and the dating ad in order to construe reproductive identities and child-rearing roles. In addition, we discuss how the apparent contradiction of gay parenting is articulated through the use of dual discursive strategies which construe the advertiser and/or target both in identifying terms of lexical categorization (as for example, donor, dad or parent) and by delineation of a child-rearing role by degrees of involvement. Our analyses suggest that gay parenting roles need not correlate one-to-one with the discrete categories chosen to identify reproductive partner. The potential gay parent is personalized across both typological and topological models of meaning-making preventing him/her from becoming a contradiction in terms. We discuss the emergent identity of `co-parent.