Repository Locke , Abigail Gendered emotion : personal , cultural or discursive ?

ing out from their participants’ talk, as something essential, and free of history and language, and I will draw on Langford’s work to demonstrate this point. Langford’s data is fascinating and as a discursive theorist, I wanted to take the analysis further and look at her participants’ accounts as particular constructions of events to perform certain interactional business. For example, Rose (p.36) describes herself as “falling in love” and thus constructs it as something that is out of her control. Langford treats transparently that Rose is ‘really’ in love, whereas in discursive terms, Rose may be providing an account for having relations with a man who lived with his partner and their children. Thus her construction of ‘fallen in love’ may serve to remove her accountability and justify her behaviour, for being in a potentially accountable situation of being ‘the other woman’. In addition, although perhaps unsurprising was the amount of emotion discourse deployed by participants in constructing their narratives of being in love.