“Take Over Take Over / You are Teachers / Take Over”: Disagreements and the Construction of Power among Women

Abstract

Abstract-Disagreement as a face threatening act is dispreferred because of violating social solidarity in talk. From gendered sociolinguistics perspective, men are attached to disagreement whereas women to agreement. This study, however, examines the strategies in which women disagree with one another as an interactional approach to convey their intended meanings. This paper draws on data from transcribed audio recorded face to face conversation of 4 groups of Iranian female friends in informal settings. The analysis of the data shows that the female participants express their disagreement boldly and explicitly, disregarding face threatening elements, just like men. It is also found that they care about maintaining their own faces more than the others' faces in the process of responding to disagreements. In addition, they exhibit a powerful style to criticize, challenge and contradict. It is finally argued that socio-cultural changes in the context of Iranian society had an impact on the females' interactive attitude.Index Terms-Disagreements, face and power, Iranian women, society. I. INTRODUCTIONDisagreement occurs when a person expresses a point of view that is in conflict with another person"s view or statement. Early works on conversation analysis (CA), concentrating on the social construction of talk, consider disagreement as a "dispreferred" second [1] since it violates the social solidarity of an interaction [2]. Disagreement can be either strong or soft. Strong disagreements are usually direct, bold, rude and offensive whereas soft disagreements are accompanied by hedges or indirect statements. However, soft or weak disagreements are preferred to strong disagreements in an interaction [3].Disagreements are more than just some utterances that are projected to express opposing ideas. According to [4], disagreements can be inter or intra culturally bonded. Reference [4] shows that in the process of disagreement, the interactants" history and their personal characteristics influence their disagreement. As such, it is very crude to look at the way the interactnats disagree without considering their sociocultural identities.Besides culture and the interactants" social background, gender of the interlocutors can influence disagreement [4] and the strategies which are employed. Drawing upon the adopted version of analysis of disagreement among men [5], Manuscript received May 24, 2014; revised August 27, 2014. Leila Mohajer is with the Women's Development Research Centre (KANITA), Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 USM, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia (e-mail: topazleos@yahoo.com).this study aims to look at the way female friends disagree with one another in single sex groups in an informal setting. The participants" gender and their socio-cultural background are taken into account in order to make a comprehensive interpretation of the analysis of the strategies they employ to disagree. Moreover, the purpose of their disagreement is considered in this study. According to Holmes [6], it is essential to focus back on women ...

Building Solidarity through Interruption in Face-to-Face Interaction amongst Iranian Men

“…Consequently, these changes have resulted in women's autonomy (Jariah Mohd. Jan & Mohajer, 2012;Mohajer, 2015a) and men's cooperative behavior (Ansari, 2008). These changes may have effected and moderated Iranian men's patriarchal roles.…”

“…However, studies that demonstrate women as becoming more assertive in talk in certain circumstances (Jariah Mohd. Jan, 2006;Mohajer, 2015a) are still lacking.…”

The Impact of Power Distance and Gender on the Choice of Disagreement Strategies in Saudi Colloquial Arabic

“…Disagreement is one of the most common practices occurring in everyday interactions, and no matter how hard speakers try to avoid it, they often find themselves in situations where they have to use it (Kreutel, 2007;Mohajer, 2015). It happens when a speaker expresses a point of view that is not in harmony with another person's view or statement.…”

“…In general, disagreement is regarded as a dispreferred act since it has the potential to jeopardize the interpersonal relationship between interlocuters (Kreutel, 2007;Mohajer, 2015). More specifically, from the perspective of politeness theory, disagreement is considered as a face threatening act in which the positive face of a hearer can be endangered (Brown & Levinson, 1987).…”