Gender Construction In Social Interaction:a Conversation Analysis Of Dating Show

Gender is a pervasive social category that is negotiated and constructed in the interaction process. The relation between gender and language has received much attention from different disciplines, such as anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociology and interactional studies. Early language and gender studies took gender as a default category and analyzed the language behaviors of men and women or the sexist language. Later, with the introduction of constructionism and the development of feminism, gender is understood as a social, constructive index which is performed and constructed through social activities and the focus of LGS shifts to the gender construction in daily interaction. These studies benefit a lot from conversation analysis as the CA emphasizes the minute analyses of daily conversation. Previous studies which apply CA to LGS mainly used data from literature, TV soaps, or authentic conversation. Little attention has been paid to the conversations in reality shows. Recent years have witnessed the increasing popularity of dating shows in China. However, conversations in those shows, which are semi-institutional and exhibit a mixture of characteristics pertaining to both casual conversation and institutional discourse and authentic, have received limited attention from linguistics, let alone in-depth research from the perspective of language and gender relation.The present research addresses the need to study TV shows as a social interaction and process in which participants constantly negotiate and construct their identities. With data from a popular dating show, If You Were the One, the present paper analyzes conversations between the male participants and female ones with the analytic framework of CA-informed DP, in particular the turn-taking, turn design and interruptions. The research findings suggest that the gender construction in interaction in the dating show is a performative and on-going process, with the female participants producing more utterances and direct the topics of conversation by giving comments and asking question and the male participants applying other linguistic strategies for masculinity construction. The reasons for this finding lie in the specific gender property that males intend to build and the very nature of the TV shows. Detailed analysis of the conversation through turns, interruption and comments shows that the major masculinity properties that the males intend to project are courtesy, determination, decisiveness and power. To this end, the male recourses to some linguistic devices, such as proper turn-yielding, interruptions, and comments. Also, though males and females employ the same linguistic devices sometimes, the different ways of using the linguistic strategies also reflect their specific intention of gender construction.