Going ‘Back to Basics’: Moral Panics about Heterosexual Relationships

Abstract

This chapter examines the increasingly heightened anxiety or ‘moral panic’ surrounding heterosexual relationships in Britain, in the context of women and men’s shifting roles, identities and relations in a rapidly changing, so-called ‘risk’ society (Beck, 1992). It focuses on the discursive construction of deviance (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994), of perceived threats to a ‘moral’/‘normal’ heterosexual life, and to the social order itself (Thompson, 1998). Such threats typically include family breakdown (divorce, cohabitation, single parenthood), homosexuality, feminism going ‘too far’, and a ‘crisis of masculinity’. Within the specific British sociocultural context, the chapter uses an example from written media as well as an extract of spoken interaction, to illustrate how dominant, resistant and alternative heterosexual identities are discursively constructed. The use of language (e.g. metaphors, exaggerated vocabulary, discourses of prediction, symbolisation and prescription) and culturally charged repertoires (e.g. about moral decline, and the individual and collective good — see Litosseliti, 2001, 2002a, b) construct particular representations, social identities and relations: for heterosexual men and women, for homosexuals, for married and cohabiting couples — and representations of the culture in general.