"Not selling anything, just think you're cute": A theoretical inquiry on 'daygaming' as an embodied cultural praxis

Abstract: This paper is a move towards furthering the understanding of how the entwinement between embodiment and agency can be understood from a sociological perspective. By focusing on the cultural praxis of ‘daygaming’, the paper analyzes Youtube material from the ‘seduction community’ and outlines the community’s cultural scripts and discourses with regards to ‘daygaming’. Hitherto, the seduction community and ‘pickup artists’ at large have been examined as disembodied phenomena, while the argument I present centers the affective and embodied dimensions of the seductive practice. The cultural praxis of ‘daygaming’ is examined as a system of meaning-making, which forms narratives pertaining to the framing and deduction of desire in addition to being presented as a social choice. I argue that the acquisition of the cultural script renews the individual’s understanding of what is socially possible and expands their interactional repertoire. This expansion of agentic comprehension yields embodied tensions, as the seduction community’s concept of ‘approach anxiety’ serves to exemplify how the corporeal character of social life can manifest itself. This tension foregrounds how agentic capacity might function in a dialectic between bodily sensations and the individual who interprets and manages these according to certain perceptual schemas and bodily techniques. Finally, the paper discusses how ‘daygaming’ and the challenges it incurs for seducers can be understood by utilizing embodied aspects of Goffman and Durkheim’s work.