Power Relation And Gender Construction In The New Era

"Power relation" and "gender" are two pervasive social categories that are constructed in the social interaction process via the same medium or carrier—"discourse", whether it being in the form of oral conversations or written texts. Throughout the development history of sociolinguistics, there are many previous scholars who have probed into power-language and gender-language relations from various perspectives and within different models and their findings generally indicated that a stereotypical model of conversational division has been established and embedded in the minds of many people. In this model males tend to dominate the floor throughout the conversation by unscrupulously violating the turn-taking rules via various devices, like impolite interruptions, and topic control; while females, on the other hand, are invariably reduced to a submissive position, trying to nurture the conversation and keep it going by strictly complying with a series of polite interaction rules.While the previous studies did provide a generally applicable model to explain the males'and females'speech patterns and linguistic features and further reveal the underlying power relation in discourses in the old days, they turned out to be a failure in un-confounding the effects of "power" and "gender" in the interlocutors'communication styles and most of them were incompetent to provide satisfactory answers to some other problems appearing in the new era, possibly due to the weaknesses in their methodology, theoretical frameworks or some other integral elements of their research design. These unexplored and unsettled problems that have sprung up lately in the modern era include: have the different conversational privileges and responsibilities in the aforementioned male-dominant model maintained in the contemporary era with the elevation of women's social status? If the answer to this question is affirmative, what are the main barriers that have prevented the contemporary people from radically eradicating the deeply-imbedded gender bias? If some favorable changes have happened to the traditional stereotypical gendered speech patterns in the modern times, what new linguistic characteristics can be found respectively in men's and women's communication styles? And what roles have these new features played in constructing masculinity and femininity in the modern era? Besides, while the previous conversational models can apply to the traditional mainstream societies pervasive with heterosexual couples with the male being more powerful and dominant, they are confronted with great challenges when used to analyze the lesbian language, the gay language and the conversational patterns of the "role-reversed" couples with females being more powerful and showing more "masculine" features, all of which invariably turn out to be contradicted with the traditional gender stratification and stereotypical gender roles.Based on a comprehensive review of the previous power-language and gender-language relation studies, the researcher of the current study find it necessary and urgent to develop an integrative approach so as to timely upgrade the previous models and theories related to the roles of power and gender in developing one's speech patterns and provide new interpretive frameworks to depict how those newly-appearing gendered linguistic features establish and construct brand new gender identities of men and women in the new era. Specifically speaking, the current study has focused on an analysis of the turn-taking pattern and linguistic features of the speakers selected from the first six seasons of the TV series Desperate Housewives in order to reveal the power relation underlying in the conversations and the functions of these features in constructing masculinity and femininity under the background of the new era within the theoretical framework of Fairclough's Three-dimensional Model for Critical Discourse Analysis and a synthesized analytical framework of Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology.Two major findings can be derived from the analysis of the data and statistic results of the study:Firstly, compared with "gender", power dynamics has contributed more to the formation of different conversational privileges and responsibilities among the selected characters of the current study. Although some statistical results do have provided some evidence to support the assertion that these differences are closely related gender, the so-called striking gender-linked differences are directly associated with the subtle power relations between the partners in the specific socio-cultural settings. Secondly, the deeply-rooted traditional gender ideology and the stereotypical gender roles are the main obstructions that have greatly constrained the contemporary people from getting rid of gender bias imbedded in their minds and serve as the major reasons why it is still difficult and challenging for women in the new era to get equal treatment.