Young children's interpretations of gender from visual text and narrative

Abstract

The field of critical feminist literacy recognises that readings of gender are influenced by texts, discourses, and textual practices. Some recent picture storybooks for young children have characters and narratives which break away from traditional gendered stereotypes. This article describes a text and some children's readings of a fictional animal story in which a bossy rooster is “tamed” by a female sheep dog. For the story to have a feminist impact, it is necessary for readers to locate their readings in discourses which recognise the femininity as well as the power of the sheep dog character. Some 7-year-old children read aspects of the picture storybook to construct gender and story in interesting and sometimes surprising ways. Semiotic and critical linguistic analysis is used to describe possible feminist textual semiotic effects of the picture storybook. Excerpts of some children's discussions of the picture storybook are also analysed to examine the processes and structures where meanings are produced from texts. The analyses focus on modality to trace the children's acceptance of “truth” or “credibility” in the text with respect to the construction of gender and the story's resolution. They highlight how textual practices of fiction and narrative act as political-cultural influences on text comprehension even for very young children. It is argued that for a critical feminist pedagogy, children not only need books with positive images of females, but they also need to learn the semiotic systems for interpreting narrative in less traditional ways.