Neill Korobov

Positioning a ‘mature’ self in interactive practices: How adolescent males negotiate ‘physical attraction’ in group talk

This article presents a discursive psychological approach in examining the ways that adolescent boys (ages 12–15 years) accomplish a sense of ‘maturity’ by bringing off and managing certain features of ‘heterosexuality’ in group interaction. We focus on and analyse moments when the boys negotiate implicit challenges, make evaluations and offer assessments concerning their physical and sexual attraction to girls’ looks. These moments are highly important for negotiating their peer status, for working toward a distinction between ‘childhood’ and ‘adolescence’, and for marking a normatively heterosexual self within the burgeoning institution of adolescence. We will specifically show how ‘heterosexual desire’ is carefully managed in group discussions where the boys participate in normative heterosexuality, but in ways that are nevertheless

Intimacy and Distancing Young Men’s Conversations About Romantic Relationships

This study examinedhow 32 pairs of 19-to 22-year-oldEuro-Americanmale friends constructed intimacy when telling romantic-relationship stories in casual conversations. Analyses centered on the emergence of two types of conversational positions: intimate positions and distancing positions. Intimate positions constructed young men as warm, caring, and emotionally vulnerable; distancing positions functioned to diminish intimacy, care, and vulnerability. Although intimate positions were present, they did not arise in a straightforward or unmarked way. Instead, intimate positions were often eclipsed or supplanted by distancing positions. The findings provide a conversationally nuanced understanding of how young men practice intimacy by constructing themselves as moving both toward and away from close relationships with women. For emerging adult males, we suggest that such shifting positions can help to develop a clearer sense of what one wants, and does not want, in a love relationship.

How late-adolescent friends share stories about relationships: The importance of mitigating the seriousness of romantic problems

This narrative study explored how late adolescents (N = 64 dyads) jointly told stories about romantic relationships during casual conversations with same-sex friends. Stories about romantic problems were four times more prevalent than stories about romantic nonproblems, and relationship instability was the most frequent type of romantic problem. Furthermore, discussions of romantic problems (versus nonproblems) were particularly likely to be softened or mitigated by projecting a detached, relaxed, or unknowing stance. Case studies of such conversational mitigation vividly illustrate how these primarily White, heterosexual, late adolescents conavigated the vagaries of developing serious and intimate bonds without appearing too invested or troubled by their romantic problems. The findings have implications for understanding the co-construction of social and personal identities.

Young Men’s Vulnerability in Relation to Women’s Resistance to Emphasized Femininity

This study uses a critical discursive approach to examine young men’s vulnerabilities in relation to emphasized femininity. Since masculinity is inextricably defined in relation to femininity, men’s achievement of masculinity is intimately dependent on, and vulnerable to, women’s complicity with traditional or emphasized femininity. Analysis centers on men’s negotiations of women’s resistance to one of three forms of emphasized femininity: (1) compliance or receptivity to men’s sexual advances and desires, (2) emotional caretaking, and (3) passivity. Rather than ratcheting up traditionally heroic and macho masculine responses, the young men managed vulnerability through self-deprecation, nonchalance, and scripting to construct an antiheroic and ordinary masculinity. Insights into the nature of men’s vulnerability in relation to women’s experience of emphasized femininity are discussed with the aim of expanding theoretical models of ‘‘men’s pain,’’ models that continue to pivot predominantly around hegemonic masculinity.

A Discursive Psychological Approach to Positioning

This article examines the current state of positioning theory as it has emerged in the work of Rom Harré and his colleagues, particularly with respect to its intended alignment with discursive psychology. Although Harrés discursive approach to positioning has been useful for drawing attention to the dynamism of social interactions and the collective construction of sociality, his ethogenic and ontological constructionist assumptions undermine his discursive approach by capitulating to cognitivist assumptions about mind, world, and discourse. Harrés discursive approach overlooks the action orientation of positioning in an attempt to reveal a realm of moral order and social rules. In contrast, I argue for (and illustrate) a discursive psychological orientation to positioning that is not tethered to ethnogenic or ontological constructionist assumptions. Rather, it is a nonontological, epistemological constructionist discursive approach that understands acts of positioning neither through psychological speculation nor cultural exegesis but rather through a close analysis of the relationship between discursive actions and social identities.

Mate-Preference Talk in Speed-Dating Conversations

In contrast to experimental psychological speed-dating research in which mate preferences are typically measured as survey responses triggered by a live interactional manipulation, the current study uses a discursive psychological perspective to examine actual mate-preference talk by potential romantic partners in live conversational contexts. Drawing on a corpus of 36 speed-dating interactions, this study examines how mate preferences were elicited, initially formulated, and how responses to mate-preference disclosures were organized across their environment of expansion. Three broad trends emerged. First, the vast majority of mate-preference disclosures were not only prompted, but were prompted in ways that occasioned delayed responses. Second, the majority of initial mate-preference formulations were delayed or mitigated, revealing that requests for and disclosures of mate preferences were delicate social actions. And finally, delayed responses often occasioned protracted expansion sequences which, at minimum, promoted cooperative topic expansion and, in some cases where the probes were inferentially elaborative (and thus more risky), topic expansion as well as affective participant stance alignment. This study reveals that stance affiliation may reflect the extent to which participants are able to incrementally coordinate inferential conjectures, a finding that suggests that social scientists interested in the genesis of close relationships would benefit enormously from an up-close analysis of the actual relational contexts in which relationships emerge.

Gendering desire in speed-dating interactions

This study examines how potential romantic partners in speed-dating encounters use gender to both proffer and formulate mate-preferences as a means of establishing affiliation. Drawing on a corpus of 36 speed-dating interactions, a sequential discursive psychological approach was used to analyze how gendered mate-preferences were initially elicited and formulated, as well as the interactional effects of mate-preferences that were designed to appear complicit versus resistant to gender conventionality. The findings reveal that both mate-preference solicitations and formulations were categorically gendered and were treated as incipient or expected, suggesting that gendering mate-preferences is a normative action in first encounters by potential romantic partners. Further, mate-preferences that were marked as conventional rarely promoted an environment of mutual affiliation, whereas mate-preferences that were formulated as resistant to gender-conventionality did tend to function as a preliminary for affective affiliation. The study reveals that the gendering of mate-preferences is a responsive social practice with an interactional design that has relational consequences for the ways potential romantic partners create connection.

‘He's got no game’: young men's stories about failed romantic and sexual experiences

This study examined how 12 small groups of young adult male friends (N = 36 participants; ages 18–23) told stories about romantic and sexual experiences. Contrary to the expectation that male friends will boast and brag to one another about their romantic endeavors, the young mens romantic and sexual stories were often about embarrassing romantic and sexual mishaps and gaffes. Like the ‘lovable loser’ laddishness that parades itself in television shows and advertisements, these forays into non-heroic masculinity were cloaked in a knowing irony and self-reflexivity that made it difficult to determine whether their positions were complicit with or resistant to normative masculinity. Critical discursive analyses focus on how positions of failed gamesmanship function in the accomplishment of male homosociality, how a sense of conventionality or ordinariness is re-claimed, and what these processes reveal about the shifting nature of hegemonic masculinity in contemporary culture.

Expanding Hegemonic Masculinity: The Use of Irony in Young Men’s Stories About Romantic Experiences

This study examines the use of irony in young men’s stories about romantic and sexual experiences. Because romantic experiences are central in the constitution of a heterosexual self, and because they are increasingly formulated in relation to traditional masculine norms and the simultaneous avowal and disavowal of effeminacy, they reveal an oscillation between complicity and resistance to hegemonic masculine norms. This oscillation is explored in stories about promiscuity, seduction, and vulnerability. Critical discursive analyses reveal how young men discursively pivot between complicity and resistance to traditional masculine norms, how this oscillation functions in the accomplishment of their romantic identities, how a sense of conventional masculinity is reclaimed, and what these processes reveal about the shifting nature of hegemonic masculinity in contemporary culture.

Social Constructionist ‘Theory Hope’: The Impasse from Theory to Practice

If one has read Gergen’s 1994 Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction, then one will find his latest book, An Invitation to Social Construction, to be very much the same. Although written with his characteristic erudition and literary volubility, Gergen’s most recent work does not really step beyond the shadow left from his last book. Even the format is eerily familiar, beginning as before by opening the space for the emergence of social constructionism by capitalizing on what he refers to as a ‘crisis of representation’, which is purportedly a failure of the traditional (mimetic, mirroring) responsibility of language, as well as on the epistemological problems of dualism, introspection, objectivity and rationality (Chapter 1). With broad stokes, Gergen genuflects to the Wittgensteinian idea of language as a game, casting acts of description and explanation away from their putatively truth-telling status to something more like Austin’s (1962) performative criteria of felicity and infelicity within particular linguistic conventions, or forms of life. As such, constructionism emerges as a metatheoretical vanguard aimed at emancipating discourse—said differently, constructionism as