Jane Sunderland

‘Parenting’ or ‘mothering’? The case of modern childcare magazines

Many magazines devoted to the topic of the care of babies and young children now have titles which include some variation of parent rather than of mother (e.g. Parent and Child rather than Mother and Baby). This corresponds to evident new directions in social practices, and suggests a desire of the publishers to appeal to female and male readers. Whether both mothers and fathers are addressed and represented in the magazines makes these magazines particularly interesting sites for the study of fatherhood discourses. In this study, three magazines (Parents, Parenting and Baby Years) were analysed in terms of the extent to which the language of their advice features addressed women and/or men, and whether they could be seen as promoting ‘shared parenting’, ‘hands-on’ fatherhood, or at least a father-friendly environment. An examination of linguistic representation (in particular, of fathers), visuals, ‘voices’, gendered stereotypes and gendered discourses of parenting suggested that fathers are in fact not being fully addressed. These magazines may be lagging behind current social change and practices in ‘Western’ parenting.

New Understandings of Gender and Language Classroom Research: Texts, Teacher Talk, and Student Talk.

While gender has been an ongoing if sometimes peripheral area of interest for researchers and practitioners in language education, conceptualizations of gender itself have developed apace. This means that, unfortunately, gender is at times viewed in an outdated way in language education, resulting in oversimplification and unproductive generalizations. In particular, women and girls are sometimes simplistically represented as victims of gender bias in language textbooks, and of male dominance in the classroom. This picture is far from being the full one, does little, I would argue, to help female students, and may mislead teachers. In this paper I present a rather more complex picture. I illustrate some subtleties and complexities of gender in language education, and suggest some implications of research for educational practice. I also demonstrate alternatives for research into gender and language classrooms, showing both how the more familiar approaches can be fruitfully developed and how researchers can go beyond them. It is important that both researchers working in the area of gender and language education, and teachers in their practice, should be able to engage with considerations of agency, individuality and diversity, while not losing sight of the still-important notions of disadvantage and of gender itself.

Language and gender : an advanced resource book

Section A: Introduction Unit 1: Early Work on Gender and Language Unit 2: The Influence of Feminism and Feminist Linguistics (a) Unit 3: The Influence of Feminism and Feminist Linguistics (b) Unit 4: Developing Understandings of Gender Unit 5: Developing Understandings of Language: Language Change Unit 6: Developing Understandings of Language: Context Unit 7: Developing Understandings of Language: Discourse and Discourses Unit 8: Approaches Unit 9: Data and Data Sites Unit 10: Written Texts Section B: Extension Unit 1: Early Work on Gender and Language Unit 2: The Influence of Feminism and Feminist Linguistics (a) Unit 3: The Influence of Feminism and Feminist Linguistics (b) Unit 4: Developing Understandings of Gender Unit 5: Developing Understandings of Language: Language Change Unit 6: Developing Understandings of Language: Context Unit 7: Developing Understandings of Language: Discourse and Discourses Unit 8: Approaches Unit 9: Data and Data Sites Unit 10: Written Texts Section C: Exploration Unit 1: Early Work on Gender and Language Unit 2: The Influence of Feminism and Feminist Linguistics (a) Unit 3: The Influence of Feminism and Feminist Linguistics (b) Unit 4: Developing Understandings of Gender Unit 5: Developing Understandings of Language: Language Change Unit 6: Developing Understandings of Language: Context Unit 7: Developing Understandings of Language: Discourse and Discourses Unit 8: Approaches Unit 9: Data and Data Sites Unit 10: Written Texts

Girls being quiet: a problem for foreign language classrooms?

The majority of quantitative and arguably of qualitative studies of gendered classroom discourse have produced depressing findings in terms of the quality and quantity of teacher attention female students attract/receive and the amount of talk they produce. In the language classroom, considered by many teachers to be a ‘girls’ world’, findings may be rather different.

The decline of man

Abstract This article looks at diachronic change in the meaning, use and interpretation of man, men, a man and man compounds in the ‘generic masculine’ sense. I suggest that during the last two decades, in the context of the on-going ‘sexist language’ debate, deliberate intervention has influenced the meaning, use and interpretation of ‘ man-words ’. I am specifically suggesting that largely due to this intervention, these words, which once had a fully generic denotative meaning (though this may have anyway been becoming less and less generic) now in many contexts have relatively little generic potential, and that their ‘genericity’ is on the whole in a state of decline. Man cannot, however, be said to have only sex-specific potential.

The linguistic, visual and multimodal representation of two-Mum and two-Dad families in children’s picturebooks

Gender representation in children’s literature is an established area of research, and the representation of sexuality increasingly so. Less established, however, is work on sexuality in picturebooks, in particular (a) the representation of gay co-parents, and (b) work with a linguistic or multimodal focus. Using a dataset of 25 picturebooks featuring two-Mum and two-Dad families, and focusing on ‘explicitness’ about their sexuality, we explore differences in the representation of the gay Mums and gay Dads. We look first at the book titles and co-parents’ names, using van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network (1996, 2008) categories of Nomination and Categorization. Secondly, we look at the indexing of gay sexuality through the linguistic, visual and multimodal representation of physical contact, starting with van Leeuwen’s (2008) Visual Social Actor Network. Although the co-parents’ sexuality was shown in positive and diverse ways, Mums were more frequently constructed than Dads as co-parents, and Dads more frequently constructed than Mums as partners. Gender appears to interact with sexuality to produce these gendered representations of the gay Mums and Dads.

Gendered Discourses in Children’s Literature

Children’s literature has been a focus of the modern Women’s Movement since its inception, with ‘sexist’ children’s stories being critiqued,1 advice provided for teachers and librarians (see Moss, 1989) and alternatives identified, welcomed, written and published. The academic study of gender in children’s books has often taken the form of content analysis (e.g. Nilsen, 1977; Peterson and Lach, 1990; Berman, 1998). Content analysis provides important background on what a text is broadly about, including potentially useful quantitative information, for example the number of female and male characters (protagonists and subordinate characters), and male and female characters’ involvement in different activities.2 Linguistic analyses are rarer — though see Baker and Freebody’s (1989) study of early reading books, which included analysis of boy, girl and the verbs used to represent their actions; and Luke (1988, 1991) on different versions of Dick and Jane books. Linguistic analyses can provide a more nuanced understanding of the less visible (and perhaps more pernicious) workings of texts — it is also possible to consider, for example, transactivization (see Talbot, below) and verb types (for example, cognitive and material (Halliday, 1994), and who is associated with which). This linguistic ‘research space’ suggests a range of possibilities for future studies.

Harry Potter and the Transfiguration of Boys’ and Girls’ Literacies

Although children’s literacy remains of concern, Harry Potter has sometimes been identified as a ray of light. This article explores the “Harry Potter effect” empirically. Questionnaire responses from 621 primary and secondary school pupils point to certain relationships between the Potter books and reported literacy practices and achievements. Most readers claimed that Harry Potter had helped their reading, but gender-differential tendencies were not significant, and claims regarding any revolutionary impact of Potter on boys’ reading would seem misplaced. Few significant gender tendencies were found, for example numbers of readers (more boys) and re-reading the novels (associated with girls).

Looking at picturebook covers multimodally: the case of two-Mum and two-Dad picturebooks

Picturebooks featuring same-sex parents, although growing in number, remain underexplored. In this article, the authors look at the covers of four such picturebooks, in particular at the representation of the co-parents and the multimodal workings of image and text. They ask: ‘How can the multimodal relationship between image and written text (the title) on the covers of picturebooks featuring same-sex parents best be described and explained?’ This study is timely in that the image–text relationship is a contested one. Drawing on the notions of modal affordance and epistemological commitment and the Hallidayan functional grammar category of enhancement, the authors use Theo van Leeuwen’s (2008, 1996) Social Actors frameworks, in particular the Visual Representation frameworks, to show that image and text (the title) are not commensurate in the meanings they communicate. Further, rather than one mode being merely supportive of the other, image and text, here, are ‘mutually enhancing’ (see Unsworth and Cléirigh’s contribution to The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, edited by Carey Jewitt, 2011). In these picturebooks, gay identities and practices can be – and indeed need to be read through an appreciation of this mutual enhancement, rather than through image or text (title) alone or in parallel. The authors propose that mutual enhancement may be characteristic of a sometime transgressive genre such as picturebooks featuring gay parents.

Gendered Discourses in the Classroom

In this chapter I describe a diverse selection of gendered discourses which have been documented in relation to classrooms — mainly, but not only, foreign language classrooms. Some were apparent in talk, some in written texts. Most of these discourses are non-classroom (and non-education)-specific, and indeed not predictably instantiated in classroom discourse, but were nevertheless flexible enough to be reproduced in classrooms. (This is a‘tribute’ in particular to the robustness and fluidity of ‘Gender differences’ discourses.) In addition to this description of gendered classroom discourses, I aim also to indicate how emancipatory, or otherwise, particular gendered discourses are for girls. (For a discussion of learning in the community in relation to gender, see Pavlenko and Piller, 2001.)