“Tú que te mereces un príncipe, un dentista”: the use of metaphors of love, desire, and gender in personal ads on the Internet to perform heterosexuality. Creating and supporting ideologies of heteronormativity and sexuality in Spanish.

Abstract

This study investigates how heterosexuality is performed and achieved in everyday language use, specifically in personal ads from the Internet. Within personal ads, it focuses on the metaphors used by ad posters to articulate concepts of love, desire, gender and sexuality. The aim was to determine how the use of certain metaphors reflects ad posters' ideologies and models of heterosexuality and how they contribute to the preservation of heteronormativity. Analyzing the language used in personal ads contributes to determining the ideologies shared by the ad posters since it is very structured, formulaic and shared in the majority of the ads, creating a genre where similar linguistic and semantic features are constantly repeated. This iterability allows an examination of how posters express individual desires in a manner determined by social rules. These rules are established by the ideologies shared by their community, and analyzing their language use allows the uncovering of the ideologies behind it. The personal ads analyzed originated from a dating website that serves Spanish speakers. The selection used in this study came from five different countries: USA, Venezuela, Spain, Mexico, and Argentina. The data analyzed included a total of 2000 ads, 400 hundred ads from each country, and from this selection 200 were of women looking for men and 200 hundred of men looking for women. Using a Critical Metaphor Analysis approach, five hundred and seventy five metaphors were identified, classified and analyzed. These metaphors were related to love, relationships, desire and gender and were classified in twelve conceptual metaphors, as well as a category called "label metaphors." The results of this study show that most ad posters use traditional metaphors of love and relationships to circulate ideologies that contribute to the maintenance of traditional gender roles and heterosexual hegemony. At the same time, some metaphors used by posters attempted to challenge and reinvent the system. Posters attempted to reinvent the system when they used innovative metaphors to oppose traditional values and portray themselves as not abiding by traditional heterosexual norms. In addition, the results of this research indicate that ad posters use metaphors to articulate the notion of gender as a performance showing that they are aware, up to a certain point, of this performativity.