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 designed to appear mature and knowing, rather than shallow, naïve or sexist. Three discursive methods of negotiation are identified and described in detail: (1) underscoring the non‐literality of actions by appealing to motives, (2) denials with built‐in concessions, and (3) differentiation through caricature. Couched within the proposed discursive framework, we are reversing the traditional logic of developmental approaches to ‘maturation’. Rather than viewing maturation as the effect of resolving developmental tasks, we argue that ‘maturity’ comes to existence in the way talk is accomplished; that is, as highly flexible and fragile projections of identity that involve a continuous refinement of ‘finely tuned positioning skills'.
This article uses a discursive psychological approach to examine the subtle ways that adolescent boys attempt to position themselves as both normatively heterosexual and unprejudiced as they manage homophobia and sexism in their talk. It is argued that homophobia and sexism are given meanings within social interaction, meanings that involve negotiating competing ideological and normative dilemmas. The analysis examines the positioning strategies used by young men to appear simultaneously complicit and resistant to masculine norms. The practical value in this work is that it provides psychologists with insight into the subtle and indirect (but pervasive) ways that young men are able to inoculate themselves from appearing obviously or unknowingly complicit with homophobia and sexism while engaging with heteronormative masculinity. Special thanks to Michael Bamberg and Michael Addis for their helpful guidance and generous feedback.
The present study explores how close same-sex friendship groups participate in the coconstruction of identities in the interpersonal domain during young adulthood. Participants included 24 same-sex college student friendship triads (12 male and 12 female; 72 total participants) who took part in semi-structured group interviews that elicited stories about conversations with their friends about dating relationship problems. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed five common responses to dating problems evidencing identity work in the context of friends' conversations. These responses included relating the issue to one's own experiences, providing validation and encouragement, joking about the problem, offering advice, and providing concrete instrumental support. Results are interpreted with regard to gender differences and similarities as well as the social context of college and developmental context of emerging adulthood. The findings identify ways in which young adults are actively co-constructing and re-evaluating their interpersonal identities within conversations with close same-sex friends.
This narrative study examined the process of personal storytelling between college-age friends who were similarly introverted or extraverted. Participants were 19 introverted and 20 extraverted samesex pairs (49 percent female) who had been friends for an average of 18 months. Stories emerged spontaneously during 10-minute catch-up conversations. Extraverted friends more often told stories that changed the topic, and more often co-constructed story plots. Introverted friends more often told stories that were embedded in a developing theme, and constructed story plots solo. With regard to content, extraverted friends told stories about romance more so than introverted friends, whose stories more often concerned family/hometown, and older events. The findings suggest that the traits of extraversion and introversion channel the identity-making process. Keywordsintroversion; extraversion; friendship; stories; identity; narrative; discourse; traits; conversation One cannot grasp the most profound logic of the social world unless one becomes immersed in the specificity of an empirical reality (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 271) With the advent of narrative psychology (Bruner, 1990), the concept of personality has expanded beyond the domain of traits, such as extraversion, to encompass identity, or the sense that people make of their lives through telling stories (McAdams, 2001). This expansion of the concept of personality to include life stories has enhanced the degree to which personality psychology attends to the whole person (McAdams, 1995), but the expansion has not been easy. A notable difficulty in connecting traits and life stories is that traits tend to be construed as genetic endowments, and life stories as psychosocial constructions (McAdams, 2001). However, it is now widely recognized that traits such as extraversion, while genetically based (e.g., Plomin, Chipuer, & Loehlin, 1990), become developmentally elaborated through psychosocial processes (Caspi, 1998).The present study builds on the idea that traits help to channel the development of other domains of personality (McLean & Pasupathi, 2006;Winter, John, Stewart, Klohnen, & Duncan, 1998). We investigated this channeling by exploring how people actively construct or "do" personality in everyday life (Cantor, 1990). A performative approach to the development of personality traits has been well-articulated by Caspi (1998), whose model of developmental Address correspondence to: Avril Thorne, University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Psychology, 277 Social Sciences 2, Santa Cruz, CA 95064,, E-mail: avril@ucsc.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, an...
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