Skapandet av en världsbild - En kvalitativ studie om genus i uttalat genusmedveten barnlitteratur

Sammanfattning: Authors: Sandra Feif and Linnéa Kronqvist Title: Shaping a Worldview - A Qualitative Study of Gender in Pronounced Gender Conscious Children’s Literature Supervisor: Marta Kolankiewicz Assessor: Malin Arvidson The aim of this study was to understand how gender and belonging norms are constructed in Swedish children’s literature that is pronounced gender conscious. To examine this, we also studied if there were any representations that challenged the gender binary between man and woman. Children’s literature is a significant part of children’s socialisation process. The norms that the books convey to the children can contribute to the understanding and creation of their view of the world. Furthermore, social norms are an essential factor of social work which contributes to the importance of examining this specific subject. Pronounced gender awareness in children’s literature is not very common in Sweden and we could only find one major publishing house with this specific focus. In total, 31 picture books for children between the ages of 0-6 years were chosen from this publisher. We have taken a qualitative approach by doing a document analysis, which included both texts and pictures. From this material, six main themes were created that represented our findings; non-gender stereotypical behaviours, non- gender stereotypical features, gender neutrality, designation of characters, the stereotype gender and finally family and sexuality. Our findings could be summarized into the tendency of using the opposites of man and woman to create gender. The gender binary was used to create both non-gender stereotypical and gender stereotypical attributes. This division was challenged by the gender neutrality that existed in the construction of the characters and the designation there of. Gender was also presented through a non-normative family, which was constructed by another type of sexuality than the normative heterosexuality.