Topic > Interruptus: A Paper Reshowing Young and Fishman's...

To further reinforce Iris Marion Young and Pamela Fishman's ideas regarding the tendency of most men to interrupt women during verbal arguments, I conducted a study of a week (December 9 to December 14, 2013) in my other six classes (i.e. Theology 121, Leadership and Strategies 10, Economics 102, Accounting 30, Filipino 14, and Law 22), composed of mixed male and female students. Before starting the experiment, I considered a few questions I wanted to answer: Would males act out more often than females? Would males interrupt females during the latter's recitation? Would boys act out more often if their teacher was also male? During the actual experiment, I used participant observation: I still acted while observing and counting my classmates' acting points. For a week, without arousing any suspicion from my classmates in six different subjects, I did what I normally do in class: I took notes, listened to the discussion and acted out when appropriate. To answer the above questions, I collected data on class size, frequency of male and female recitation, teacher gender by subject, and other relevant observations. The data is tabulated at the bottom of the page. Below the table are the formulas I used to obtain these values. In recording the total recitations, I only considered individual recitations or contributions: the choral responses of a group were not counted. Most of the time there were pupils who acted consistently; thus increasing the total acting points counted for the group represented. On the other hand, during my first day of experimentation, I calculated the total acting opportunities considering the cases... middle of the paper... it is worth noting that although males dominated females during class discussions, there there have been cases where I have seen women interrupt men's statements, openly expressing their disagreement. There were also cases where women explained concepts recited by men in more depth. Some female students even interrupted our Accounting teacher just to clarify points and ask questions. As I saw in class, deviance is not only limited to those who ignored the rules to break the norm, but it is also possessed. and exercised by those individuals and groups who have found the strength to break away from labels and limitations. In this simple everyday case of classroom discussions, the women's act of interruption shows an attempt to break with social dictates that seek to limit their right of expression – in fact a true power of deviance.