La lupa de géneroUn diagnóstico de la representación de género en libros de narrativa infantil de planes lectores de primaria en Perú

Abstract

Children's literature tells stories and proposes scale models of a particular society and culture, including gender models, which can affect the formation of students' identity, as well as their gender socialization. Thus, these books should be chosen with much care, taking into consideration issues that transcend its literary quality and its didactic potential. Research on gender representation has revealed persistent patterns of inequity, both in the presence of male and female characters and in the reproduction and perpetuation of gender roles and stereotypes. For this reason, it is relevant to have instruments that allow for the diagnostic of issues such as gender representation in children's literature, instruments like the one we introduce in this thesis, because the models of men and women that the books convey can affect aspirations and self-perceptions of the readers. The Gender Representation Diagnostic Grid (GRG) lets us analyze a corpus of 85 children's narrative books that are read as part of the various Peruvian reading plans from five areas: extratextual elements, paratexts, characterization, the narrator, and general appreciations, each one with relevant variables and indicators to identify and analyze the gender representation in the books of a school reading plan. Our study reveals a notorious trend in the books of the corpus which tend towards a traditional, unequal and unbalanced representation in favor of the masculine, although we perceive an incipient change that aims to leave behind this type of gender models that limit the aspirations and full emotional and identity development of young elementary school readers.