Whilst the dialogue was not leading to discourses in Dutch society regarding women, that I had scaffolded the discussion towards, the dialogue was nevertheless intercultural. The exchange is perhaps a little essentialist in its focus and conducted at a very general level, but I had encouraged that by my initial questioning about ‘Dutchness’. She was interested to what degree you could infer whether there is more of a taboo on talking about relationships in England than in the Netherlands. Her analysis, that it did not contain anything about relationships, was taken further by Marijke. G: And then particularly the fairly serious tone about relationships, that therapeutic part?Ĭlaire: No, because I think in England we don’t talk about these kind of things, because I think men, but also women, don’t talk in the same way about sex.Ĭlaire: In the Netherlands it is very… you have 6 men and 6 women who live together and maybe, I don’t know, you talk about sex and that kind of thing…Ĭlaire: But you talk about relationships.Ĭlaire: But I think in England I don’t talk with my friends about my relationship except in a more general way.Ĭlaire had taken an intercultural stance by looking at an English version of Men’s Health for comparison. Marijke: But do you think, that what you said, that MH is only about sport, that talking about relationships that it is not possible/acceptable, that it is too open?Ĭlaire: In England you can’t do it, yes, I think that in England you can’t publish it in an English publication for men. je hebt 6 mannen en 6 vrouwen die woont bij elkaar en misschien ik weet het niet, praat je over seks en dat soort dingen.Ĭlaire: Maar ik denk in Engeland ik praat niet met mijn vrienden over mijn relatie behalve dan in een meer generale manier.Ĭlaire: Yes, but I have to say, when I was in Waterstone’s I had a look, and in MH in England there is nothing, or just a small article about sex, and all other articles are about sport and health… how you can have a better ‘sixpack’…Ĭlaire: Yes, and a better these shoes for football. G: En dan met name het vrij serieuze over relaties en het therapeutische gedeelte…?Ĭlaire: Nee, nee want ik denk dat in Engeland we praten niet over deze soort dingen, want ik denk mannen, maar ook vrouwen praten niet in dezelfde manier over seks.Ĭlaire: In Nederland is het heel. Marijke: Maar denk… dan wat je ook zei dat over MH dat het alleen maar over sport gaat, dat praten over relaties, dat dat niet helemaal kan, dat dat te open is?Ĭlaire: In Engeland het kan niet ja, ik denk dat in Engeland je kan het niet publiceren in een Engelse mannelijke publicatie. The discussion which I had hoped to kick-start on whether there was Dutch articulation to some of the discourses employed, became a content-oriented one, based on personal experience, or at least what they had inferred and observed about differences in relationships in England and the Netherlands:Ĭlaire: Ja, maar ik moet zeggen ik heb in MH in Engeland gekijkt wanneer ik was in Waterstone’s en MH in Engeland is niks te doen, of er is een klein artikel over seks maar al andere artikelen zijn over sport en health hoe je kan een betere sixpack hebben.Ĭlaire: Ja, en een betere… ’deze schoenen voor voetbal’. Marijke took on the role of ‘learner’ about English culture. As in the previous set of data, they ‘talked around the text’ and focused on the difference in conventions in how people talk about relationships: what can you say and what not? The students are relating it to previous knowledge and experience gained when living in the Netherlands. The exchange student, Marijke, responded as I had expected, saying that this kind of discourse certainly does not surprise her, but the regular students of the class did not seem to want to pursue this line of analysis. In the fragment below I am trying to bring this discussion into the foreground. This discourse was made more acceptable by another discourse which also carried a Dutch flavour: that of therapy and self-development, which, I thought, would equally have been out of place in an English magazine aimed at men. As I describe in more detail in Chapter 4, my own interpretation had been that the extreme traditional positioning of women as needing to find fulfilment through motherhood, would not have been acceptable in an English publication, not even in a men’s one. I asked students whether they felt that this issue would have been written about in a similar way in an English magazine aimed at men. Students had indeed recognized the global, or at least western, the relevance of the text and made intertextual references to American and English soaps and films. \( \newcommand\)Įven though the topic discussed was transcultural, and certainly not specifically Dutch, as mentioned, I felt this particular texts showed what I called Dutch articulations in the text.
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