Dating Advertisements: Discourses of the Commodified Self

Abstract

Dating advertisements are the textual products of a discourse of commodification and marketization. They are certainly a prime site for witnessing the textual construction of self- and other-identities in the service of developing new relationships. Furthermore, close examination of a corpus of written and spoken dating advertisements reveals advertisers' resources for resisting full-blown self-commodification. Individuals can, to some extent, extricate themselves from the constraints of the media in which they operate. The analyses suggest that the moral case against `pernicious commodification', as a recurrent contemporary discursive formation and as a threat to late-modern self-identities and relationships, is overstated.