Boys gossip telling: Staging identities and indexing (unacceptable) masculine behavior

Abstract

This study explores the ways preadolescent boys stage identities in gossip telling and index a particular behavior as masculine as part of this process. Data are drawn from ethnographic research combined with recordings of Swedish preadolescent boys' everyday interaction in an afterschool program situated in a low-income suburb in Sweden. When examined in detail it is found that the boy's gossip telling, similar to findings from among females, provides rich interactional resources for the speaker to depict others' characters as deviant, solicit support, and strengthen solidarity. These similarities do not, however, indicate that the boys' social organization is similar to the girls' social concerns, but that boys and girls construct overlapping identities in interaction. The indexing of (unacceptable) behavior in the boys' gossip telling demonstrates, however, that the boys have not adopted behavior typical of females. The social identities the boys invoke were animated by traditional working-class masculine anxieties about being socially excluded, associated with physical and emotional vulnerability, weakness, and cowardice. The findings underscore the need to account for the ways particular boys (and girls) occasion and index identities in everyday gossip telling and the (institutional and cultural) frameworks embedded in the interaction.

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