A multimodal approach to gender construction in children’s stories: a case study

Femininity (and masculinity) patterns are learnt from childhood. The role of education, mass media, games and family environment are crucial in determining the child’s future conception of gender. Within this framework, the stories that children read (or are read to by their parents) also help them...

Full description

Autores:
Maíz Arévalo, Carmen
Tipo de recurso:
Article of journal
Fecha de publicación:
2008
Institución:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Repositorio:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Idioma:
spa
OAI Identifier:
oai:repositorio.unal.edu.co:unal/55213
Acceso en línea:
https://repositorio.unal.edu.co/handle/unal/55213
http://bdigital.unal.edu.co/50532/
Palabra clave:
3 Ciencias sociales / Social sciences
Gender construction
Children stories
Multimodality
Construcción de género
Cuentos de niños
Multimodalidad
Rights
openAccess
License
Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional
Description
Summary:Femininity (and masculinity) patterns are learnt from childhood. The role of education, mass media, games and family environment are crucial in determining the child’s future conception of gender. Within this framework, the stories that children read (or are read to by their parents) also help them form their concept of what boys and girls are like and how they are expected to act. In these tales, ideology is not only linguistically encoded but also by visual means, which makes a multimodal approach to these texts a welcome analytical tool. The present paper is aimed at analysing two editions of the same fairy tales within a time span of twenty years from a multimodal perspective. The analysis will show that there has been a significant (and positive) change in gender construction regarding female characters.