What Love Has to Do with It: The Cultural Construction of Emotion and Sorority Women's Responses to Forcible Interaction

Abstract

This paper examines 268 sorority women's interpretations of and emotional responses to a range of hypothetical and real attempts at forcible interaction (ranging from “pestering” to “stalking”) in dating and long-term relationships they seek to terminate. 1 analyze quantitative and qualitative survey data from an interactionist perspective, focusing on the influence of romantic cultural imagery and the effect of relational circumstance in hypothetical situations and in these women's experiences. While forcible interaction is a distressing phenomenon that annoys and frightens young women in the context of dating relationships, when suitors and pursuers choose from romantic repertoires, they significantly complicate interpretations of these coercive and intrusive attempts. Pursuers who are former intimates accentuate this effect; not only do women perceive romantic attempts as more flattering and romantic, but they are much less likely to consider them annoying or frightening. Vocabularies of emotion and role may make the use of romantic repertoires effective strategies for maintaining unwanted interaction and redefining relationships from which young women are attempting to disengage. Culture and structure thus interpenetrate and shape these individual women's actions, and I discuss implications for resistant interaction.

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