Are males and females still portrayed stereotypically? Visual analyses of gender in two Hong Kong primary English Language textbook series^†

† This paper is part of the author’s Ph.D. thesis.

ABSTRACT

The present study examines how gender is represented in the visuals (or illustrations) of two English Language textbook series used in most primary schools in Hong Kong. Instead of conducting frequency counts of the occurrence of male and female characters in illustrations, or the spheres of activities they engaged in as in many previous textbook studies, this study involves qualitative analyses of how visualised male and female characters are represented in the selected illustrations of the analysed textbook series, particularly but not exclusively, in terms of their hair length and clothing. The results show that representations of females were more often portrayed having long hair rather than short hair and wearing dresses rather than trousers in both line drawings and photographs. For the colour of clothing, although blue and pink are generally considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ colours, respectively, less than half and only a small percentage of the human males and females were portrayed wearing blue and pink, respectively. For non-human characters, again, colour is not always a reliable cue to their sex. Yet, they can be recognised as males and females by the generally accepted ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ colour and clothing items. Hence, while binary notions of gender often remained intact in their normative forms there were also other forms of representation which challenged them.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender representation
• visuals/illustrations
• English Language
• textbooks
• Hong Kong
• human and non-human characters

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge Dr Jane Sunderland from Lancaster University for her invaluable comments given to my earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for refereeing my paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

† This paper is part of the author’s Ph.D. thesis.

1 Visuals and illustrations are used interchangeably in this article.