GENDER CONSTRUCTION IN VISUAL IMAGES IN TEXTBOOKS FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

In the Indonesian context, little has been done to raise awareness of political correctness in gender matters in school textbooks. As an attempt to fill this gap, I conducted a textual analysis on four English language textbooks used in Indonesian primary schools. The focus of the study was on the pictorial texts accompanying the linguistic ones. The Visual Grammar‘, developed by Kress and van Leeuwen, was used as the framework of analysis. The results showed that the illustrations accompanying linguistic texts fortified the representations of gender asymmetry. Females were depicted more dependent than males and were also construed to be admirers of an action carried out by the males. The study recommended conscious efforts to value both genders equally in visualization as meaning construction is multimodal.