Previous research on marital conflict talk has highlighted the outcome of the process—listing the strategies that the husbands and the wives exploited respectively. However, there is scant research on the gender marking in the conflicting interaction. This study investigates the interactional process of marital conflict talk in order to understand how gender differences are reflected as part of the conversational strategies by women and men and how the couples construct their gender identities through the interactional strategies.
Data used for this study are taken from a popular TV mediation program called Gold Medal Mediation aired in mainland China. The show features a disputing couple, and their problems are publically discussed with a jury of experts in the live audience studio. Each featured couple will reach a legally-binding settlement at the end of the episode. The most common reason for a dispute is a couple’s personal and domestic matter. I sampled 570 episodes, and analyzed the data with Conversation Analysis (CA) approach.
The results show that there are six verbal interactional strategies (rhetorical questions, supportive assertion, denial, moral persuasion, command, and demand for evidence) and two non-verbal interactional strategies (silence and laughter), through which the couples have employed to initiate, develop, and terminate conflict talk. Moreover, the couples made linguistic reference to gender index (“man”/“男人”, “woman”/“女人”, “girl”/“女孩”, “husband”/“丈夫”, “wife”/“妻子”, etc.) and gender activities and stereotypes (“labor division”/“男主外女主内” ) to challenge or reinforce masculinity and femininity. Most importantly, the couples communicatively constructed and negotiated their gender identities during their conflict talk: The couples performed their gender identities mainly based on the ‘sex differences’ and took gender-related responsibility for granted, reinforcing masculine or feminine ideologies. This was done through linguistic reference to gender index as well as gender activities along with some embodied expressions such as facial and/or body movements. The data also reveal that gender stereotypes in marriage were also challenged by some participants ("我是任性吗？"). The categories of gender (masculinity or femininity) were also critiqued during some conflict talks.
