Location, lore and language: An erotic triangle

Abstract

This study addresses how language interacts with the erotic and ‘place’ (our socially understood surroundings) in an online, text-only, mostly linguistic environment to create an erotic atmosphere, and how eroticised atmosphere relates to linguistically driven sexual subject formation. Analysis focuses on extracts from a conversation in which public erotic discussions unfold between participants who are (ostensibly) men who desire men. A ‘room’ spatiality is continually performed, sometimes relying upon idealised images of ‘erotic oases’ from the offline world to build an erotic atmosphere. These offline erotic oases are places of ‘deviance’ characterised by semi-public sex (e.g. parks, public washrooms, and saunas). This type of atmosphere is contested by some participants while others embrace it. Analysis demonstrates that eroticism, spatiality, and language adapt to one another along a reformulating path. This suggests that a more nuanced understanding of language and the erotic depends on spatial investigations as much as discursive theory.