Online Sex Talk and the Social World: Mediated Desire  by Chrystie Myketiak investigates online conversations about desire that take place in one community over an 18 month period.

Chrystie, who is a Principal Lecturer in language and linguistics says: “Data like this is very difficult for linguists to access, but I had access to all of the conversational transcripts from all of the spaces in the community. This meant that I didn’t participate in the conversations that formed the data, and the lack of researcher involvement can be important for linguistic research because it meant that there was no potential that the conversations were less natural.”

The book analyses these conversations in order to provide a comprehensive account of the form, function and structure of sexuality and desire in various conversational settings, and shows how these relate to speakers’ communicative competence and their repertoire of discursive resources (including space). In doing so, the book shows how these conversations themselves act as resources for speakers to navigate their identities, their desires and their membership in the community within the expectations and ideologies of both the community and the wider sociocultural world.