Att skildra mångfald i läromedel. Hur en inkluderande intention kan skapa underordning

Abstract

This article explores the construction of gendered ethnicity in some of the characters portrayed in readers used in the lower classes of the Swedish comprehensive school. The purpose is to show how what I call “critical intersectional discourse analysis” can be used on textbook content. The analysis sheds light on underlying ideals and values in hegemonic discourses, and the very complex ways these values combine intersectionally, to construct the characters in the analysed texts. Text and illustrations are seen as interacting parts of a whole and as part of a greater societal context. At the same time, the analysis demonstrates how historical and contemporary discourses influence text content. These discourses create contradictory meanings and identities, as well as certain power relations, within the text as well as in relation to different readers. The preferred reading inevitably transforms the majority’s ways of behaving into a generalised norm. The configuration of characters presented in the textbooks thereby stereotypes and marginalizes characters who differ from majority norms, creating a coding of the world into “us and them”. The focus in this study is on the way certain children presented in the readers are constructed as deviations, who are implicitly contrasted to an unarticulated heteronormative adult Western norm, and therefore inevitably positioned as subordinated in relation to that norm.