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Gender Issues in Children's Literature

Writers, publishers, teachers and parents need to closely scrutinise gender construction in children’s literature so that young children are presented with stories that promote equality and respect for both sexes according to Ramesh Nair from the Academy of Language Studies.

In his research, Ramesh Nair explored the construction of gender in a selection of Malaysian children’s literature texts written in the English language. The aim was to examine the subtle gender-based messages that these texts inherently contain. The researcher aimed to examine surface level features and simultaneously scrutinised the way in which the various characters were constructed linguistically and through visual language.

For this reason, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was adopted as an approach to reading gender construction in Malaysian children’s literature. CDA is an approach that looks at how power imbalances are played out through choices made in language use and other semiotic modes. Four methods of analysis were relied upon – a content analysis, a lexical analysis, a transitivity analysis and a visual analysis.