Conversational Dominance in Mix Gendered Pakistani Political TV Talk Shows

Abstract

Cooperation in conversation is managed by all participants through turn-taking. In most cultures, generally speaking,only one person speaks at a time. It is generally believed that women are subjected to interruptions and overlapping more in cross-sex conversations.This research has been carried out by using mixed method approach where both conversational analysis and content analysis have been used to prove that the female gender overlaps more in Pakistani political talk shows and it has also been exposed how the cultural advantage of “being a woman” is exploited by the female speakers. For this, two episodes of a famous political talk show, "On the Front," have been studied. This study proves how the female speakers have successfully used power and cultural advantage of being a woman through excessive use of interruptions, which resulted in their dominance in the conversation, preventing male members from taking their turn.