Departing from interactionally focused research on the
“representations” (cf. “constructions”) of the
“other,” including recent dynamic approaches to the
sociolinguistics of style/styling, this article looks into the
practice of talk about men that resonated in the conversations of four
Greek adolescent female “best friends.” The discussion sheds
light on the interactional resources that participants draw upon to refer
to and identify or categorize men, their local meanings, and their
consequentiality for gender identity constructions (in this case, both
masculinities and femininities). It is shown that personae and social
positions of men are drawn in the data by means of a set of resources
(nicknames, character assessments, stylizations, membership categorization
devices) that occur in, shape, and are shaped by story lines (intertextual
and coconstructed stories that locate men in social place and time). It is
also shown that the men talked about are predominantly marked for their
gendered identities: Social styles that represent men as
“soft” (“babyish,” “feminine”) or
“tough” (“hard”) are those that are more routinely
invoked. Each mobilizes specific resources (e.g. stylizations of the local
dialect for “hard” men), but both are drawn playfully. The
conclusion considers the implications of such discursive representations
for the gender ideologies at work and the participants' own identity
constructions and subjectivities.Earlier
versions of this article were presented at the Birkbeck College Applied
Linguistics seminars and at the 8th International Pragmatics Association
Conference, Toronto, 2003. I am grateful to audiences there for their
comments, to Nikolas Coupland for fiercely constructive criticism, to an
anonymous reviewer for encouragement, and last but not least, to the sharp
editorial eye of Jane Hill.