DATING ADVERTISEMENTS - DISCOURSES OF THE COMMODIFIED SELF

Dating advertisements are the textual products of a discourse of commo dification and marketization. They are certainly a prime site for witn essing the textual construction of self- and other-identities in the s ervice of developing new relationships. Furthermore, dose examination of a corpus of written and spoken dating advertisements reveals advert isers' resources for resisting full-blown self-commodification. Indivi duals can, to some extent, extricate themselves from the constraints o f the media in which they operate. The analyses suggest that the moral case against 'pernicious commodification', as a recurrent contemporar y discursive formation and as a threat to late-modern self-identities and relationships, is overstated.