ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how undergraduate women, mostly sorority women, interpret and respond emotionally to a series of hypothetical and real attempts at forcible interaction in dating and long-term relationships they seek to terminate. I use the term "forcible interaction" rather than "stalking7' because these attempts range from what we might define as merely "pestering77 to behaviors that begin to emulate the stalking reported by women in the Domestic Violence Unit. I look at interactions that encompass more (and less) than what we have seen thus far. I want to start to sort out what is and is not problematic for women, and at which point they "draw the line.77 This is important, because stalking does not usually spring full-blown into birth. Rather, as we have observed, women come to see it as developing over time. This means that how women respond in "early stages,77 if such there be, can affect the course of stalking that does emerge, leading to ongoing processes of definition and redefinition. Most of the data derive from a survey of 267 sorority women, in which I focus on the influence of romantic cultural imagery and the effect of "relational circumstance77 (Goffman 1983), or type of relationship, in hypothetical situations and in these women's experiences. These data are supplemented by interviews conducted with twenty undergraduate women about their dating experiences, in this and in an earlier study (Dunn 1998).
