Female or male? : A gender study of the creation of the characters in some of the most popular children’s picture books today

The aim of this Master’s thesis is to examine how gender is described in some of the most popular children’s picture books in year 2007 and 2008. The theory used is based on Berger’s and Luckmann’s theory about Social construction, Bjerrum Nielsen’s and Rudberg’s theory about Gender socialization, Gens’ theory How girls becomes women and boys becomes men and Hirdman’s theory about Gender contracts. The method used is an analysis of ideal types. The direction of the method is partly hermeneutical. The ideal types used in this thesis are based upon Max Weber’s ideal types. I have constructed three ideal types which I use in this thesis. These three are: traditional behavior, varying behavior and contrasting behavior. In ten picture books, I have picked some characters from each book, both children characters and adult characters, and put them into one of the ideal type groups. I will describe the method of selections of books and characters later in the thesis. The result shows that everyone of the children characters’ behavior in the books are in contrast to the traditional gender structures in the society. The adult characters, though, have a more even distribution to the three ideal types groups. This result is a contrast to the result of several science papers on this subject through the years. According to this result, it seems like the writers of children´s picture books over the last years have become more conscious of the traditional gender system and is therefore more willing to give the characters contrasting behavior due to the traditional gender roles.Program: Bibliotekari