Knowledge of love: narratives of romance told by 12-year-old children

Abstract

This article reports research on young people's conceptualisations of love and romance through a gender perspective. The data are stories written by 12-year-old girls and boys in Norway who were asked to fantasise about their future love life. Their narratives are explored through discourse analysis and semiotics and analysed within a sociological framework. The article has two major aims. The first is to contribute to the methodology of collecting essays written by young people to gain knowledge of their conceptions of adult life. The second aim is to offer new findings on the specific subject of romantic love in contemporary society, by describing how to do love in young people's fiction.

Keywords:

• love
• heterosexuality
• gender
• young people's narratives
• constructivism
• subject positions
• text analysis