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The Role of Illustrations in the Construction of Gender IdentitiesPage 2 of 6
Paragraph 2: Introduction The manuals consulted correspond to the disciplines which were mostly devoted to the transmission of behaviour and conducts: urbanity, civics, hygiene, religion, and particular texts used for teaching of reading. A first revision and observation of school textbooks leads us to realize that there are, both in nowadays’ manuals and in those published during the Franco regime, certain emotions used for the purpose of encouraging readers, in this case young students, to identify those behaviours and conducts considered to be adequate and correspondent to their times and their sex. We want to focus on powerful emotions which also appear more often than others. These are: joy and happiness, in this case joined to the feeling of pride; shame, and fear. The latter is represented in two different ways: firstly, the fear of punishment, taken to its extreme in religion textbooks, where punishment is represented by eternal fire; secondly, the fear of being rejected by others, of failure, of incompetence, of a lack of capacity to belong to a group. This fear, according to experts in developmental psychology of emotions, emerges at the age of five, in the middle childhood, when the child enters the social world1. For this analysis I have selected various primary school textbooks precisely because they are characterized by the large number of images they contain and the variety of topics they address.
1 Barrio, Mª Victoria del (2002): Emociones infantiles. Evolución, evaluación y prevención. Madrid, Ediciones Pirámide, p. 148. |
