Flirting

Abstract

This chapter explores the discursive and non-discursive potential of the body through a consideration of flirtation. I choose to raise this topic because it questions treating the body as primarily the object of discourse. I also question the notion that the body might somehow lie outside discourse altogether, meaning that it is not subject to how people think and talk about social life. Instead, this chapter acknowledges that flirtation is possible only because people employ discourse to frame their actions. However, more important still, it argues that flirting is done only by people who are embodied (who are not just have bodies), and that this crucially involves the use of symbolic gesture. This means that any consideration of this topic must take due account of how people flirt, not just what they say about, or even during, flirting. The act of flirting must necessarily involve knowledge practices, and with that the idea of a discourse of sexuality, so that the schemes involved here can well be thought of as discursively ordered. In that case, why choose flirting rather than some other social activity? The simple answer is that flirting involves the body in ways that many other activities do not. Flirting directly implicates the body at two levels, as it were, as being both the medium and the object of communication.