Gender and Power: A Study of Participatory Dominance in Iranian Plays

Document Type : .

Author
Behzad Rahbar
Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran
10.30465/lsi.2024.49408.1771
Abstract
The current study evaluates the real-life interactions between genders and selects the reconstructed environment of the plays in which refined and thoughtful human interactions are manifested. The study aimed to investigate the effect of gender on the production of linguistic factors of interruptions, overlapping, and tag questions as the main factors of participatory dominance in conversation. Gender is examined on two levels: the gender of the drama characters and the gender of the playwrights. Dialogues are also compared in two periods before and after the 1979 revolution. The statistical population of this research is all Iranian plays published in the last sixty years of Iran's dramatic literature, and the sample consists of nine plays selected by non-random sampling. The results of this study show that the frequency of interruptions among men is more than that of women, and the overlapping and the use of tag questions are far more common in women than in men. The gender of playwrights significantly affects the production of two factors of overlapping and tag questions, but it does not affect the reproduction of interruptions. Among the factors of participatory dominance, the frequency of interruptions and overlaps in pre-revolutionary works has been greater than in post-revolutionary works. In general, this study confirms the reproduction of gender in the discourse of men and women and shows that the Iranian dramatic literature discourse contains sexist components. The results of this research are beneficial for writers, social linguists, sociologists, and language planners in understanding linguistic and conversational patterns, as well as familiarity with the paradigm of distribution of power relations between the two sexes, and ultimately a better understanding of language and its functions in society.
Keywords
dominance theory
gender
interruption
overlapping
tag questions
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Language and Linguistics
Volume 20, Issue 40
March 2025
Pages 79-106