Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Mala Vasegh ¹
• MEHDI PURMOHAMMAD ²

¹ PhD Candidate in Cognitive Linguistic, Institute for Cognitive Science Studies

² Assistant Professor of psycholinguistics, Institute for Cognitive Science Studies

Abstract

Children’s and adolescent literature plays an important role in socializing the audience and reflects the conditions of society, beliefs, traditions and opinions that shape readers' mentality and perception of the various phenomena on which they are based. One of the most important aspects of socializing is the formation of concept of gender identity in the children's mentality, which stabilizes in adolescence. The fictional literature as the most socially used genre can be the best source to present the image that Iranian children and adolence literature have about the concept of gender. Children get acquainted to the new world through the book and gain new and different experiences. The present study investigates the status and role of women, men and gender stereotypes in child literature. A total number of 200 Persian fiction books were analyzed. The results show that a gender-based discrimination was found in the books awarded as the top best-selling books by Iran Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Younh Adult for a decade from 1385 to 1395. In these books, the number of male characters and names was almost twice as much as female characters. The main female characters of the text were seen more often. This article investigates the stereotypes of children's picture books which play a role in shaping gender identity.

Keywords

• children's literature
• dominant thinking about gender
• gender stereotyping
• overshadowing women
• sociolinguistics

Main Subjects

• Social Interaction
• The Impact of Language Planning
• Sociology of Language Learning/Teaching
• Language and Culture
• The Social Embedding of Language Variation and Change
• The Social Stratification of Language and Identity
• Language Policies
• Linguistic Anthropology