Gender Identity in Words for Professional Titles in Textbooks

Abstract

The literature on textbooks in Spanish for Spanish as a Foreign Language (henceforth ELE) analysed from a gender perspective is very scarce. Not only has it not dealt with the six dimensions covered by Sunderland (1994b:55) in the analysis of stereotypes — visibility, occupational roles, relationships, personal characteristics, discourse roles and female degradation — but most analyses have been superficial. The pages of the proceedings of the annual conferences of the Association for the Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language (ASELE) outnumber 15,000 but during the 20 years of the Association’s existence, only one paper has dealt with sexist representation in ELE textbooks (Galiano Sierra, 1993); one other paper has shown concern for the treatment of gender in five entries of professional titles in ELE dictionaries (Gallardo Saborido, 2005); and four papers have put forward some practical exercises addressed to ELE students to raise consciousness on sexist language in Spanish (Izquierdo Merino, 1998; Sitman et al., 1999; Portal Nieto, 2000; Guerrero Salazar, 2003). Outside ASELE, research on the representation of gender identities in ELE materials has also received the scantest attention: De Santiago Guervós (1996) investigated sexist roles, negative representations of women and their contribution to disempow- ering women in eight ELE textbooks published between 1976 and 1994.KeywordsGender IdentityMain Research QuestionGrammatical GenderGender ViolenceReal AcademiaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.