Scope and Aims of the Book
A Multimodal Approach to Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books is a collection of research papers in the fields of multimodality and picture books.1 The chapters broaden the previous analyses of this genre, carried out from content, psychological, literary and didactic points of view. Most of the analyses of picture books come from literary studies (Moebius 1986; Nodelman 1988; Nikolajeva and Scott 2001), narrative theory (Genette 1980), didactic perspectives (Kümmerling-Meibauer et al. 2015) and content approaches (Cohen et al. 2007; Sunderland 2012). The results of these analyses are extremely revealing and predominantly focus on content issues: on the number of male and female characters that appear in the stories, the frequency in which these characters carry out a leading or secondary role, the garments they wear, aspect of distance and proximity, the narrative structure of the stories, the stories’ didactic possibilities for introducing children to literature, etc. Although these earlier studies are relevant, they are largely qualitative, and are often based more on descriptive than on linguistic analyses. On other occasions, the text-image interface has been approached using classifications that were excessively anchored to established lexical-grammatical, cohesive (Martinec and Salway 2005), rhetorical (Bateman 2008) or transitivity structure models that do not adapt easily to the visual mode (Bateman 2014). So, it seems that, as McGlashan indicates in Chapter 11, there is still a gap in the literature for approaching verbal, visual and multimodal trends/tendencies in visual narratives.
Certainly, there are also some researchers who have taken a multimodal perspective in their analyses of specific children’s picture books, for example Lewis (2006), Unsworth (2008), Painter (2007), Martin (2008) and Moya-Guijarro (2014), among others. Yet there are still too few multimodal studies that focus on how a common theme and communicative purpose are captured in a unified manner in a selected sample of children’s picture books; in our case, in stories that challenge gender stereotypes and the concept of the traditional family. The research presented here addresses this gap by focusing on a sample of children’s picture books that in some way question and challenge stereotypes concerning gender or the concept of a traditional family, or which promote the social inclusion of same-sex parent families.
Starting from this premise, the contributing authors of this volume aim to explore the choices afforded to the writer/illustrator in transmitting representational, interpersonal and textual meanings in both the verbal and non-verbal components in a selection of children’s picture books. More specifically, the main aims of the book are to identify the verbal and visual strategies that are available to authors and illustrators for (i) generating representational meaning and construing gender (representational metafunction), (ii) establishing an interaction between the characters of the story and also between the protagonists and the young readers (interpersonal metafunction) and, finally, (iii) creating informatively coherent multimodal texts (textual/compositional metafunction) in a sample of children’s picture books written in or translated into English (Halliday 2004; O’Halloran 2004; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Moya-Guijarro 2014). Finally (iv), the aim of the volume is also to examine the complementarity or synergy that is created between the text and illustrations to transmit meaning in multimodal children’s narratives (Painter, Martin and Unsworth 2013). Summarising, the chapters in the volume reveal how verbal and visual semiotic modes interrelate in order to promote gender equality and social inclusion in children’s visual narratives.
Picture Books, Multimodality and Gender
In the final decades of the twentieth century, Nodelman (1988: ix) pointed out that “most discussions of children’s picture books have either ignored their visual elements altogether or else treated the pictures as objects of a traditional sort of art appreciation rather than narrative elements”. Nowadays, however, scholars of Children’s Literature, writers, illustrators and teachers recognise that good picture books are complex visual narratives in which both words and images play an important role in the construction of the stories. The function of images is not just to make the picture books more appealing and accessible to young and inexperienced readers; quite the opposite, they play a key part in creating and raising ideas that are beyond the meanings that the verbal or visual modes can each convey on their own (Nodelman 1988; Arizpe and Styles 2003; Painter and Martin 2011; Moya-Guijarro 2019a and b). In line with this thought, in this book all the chapters start from the premise that picture books can only be understood and approached as complex multimodal products, in which images and words complement each other in different ways to create meaning. Indeed, this variation across modalities is, as Painter and Martin (2011) point out, a common literary and pedagogic strategy used in visual narratives intended for young children.
Another characteristic of children’s picture books is their potentiality for dealing with diverse and controversial topics such as death, depression, violence, wars and discrimination (Colomer, Kümmerling-Meibauer and Silva-Díaz 2010; Evans 2015). Some researchers on children’s literature assume that picture books should provide children with the necessary tools to face controversial problems that they may encounter in their lives (Evans 2015; Nodelman 2015). Adopting a similar point of view, Nikolajeva (2014: 125) considers that the absence of controversial topics in children’s books deprives them from the opportunity to develop their basic emotions and, more importantly, to raise their empathy to others involved in situations of distress, fear or anger different from their own.
Among the different topics that are approached in picture books are also those related to gender issues, as shown by the studies carried out by Knowles and Malmkjaer (1996), Wharton (2005) and, especially, Sunderland (2012). Sunderland (2012: 143), for example, has carried out a study on the content of a sample of picture books that feature boys and girls who do not conform to gender stereotypes. Her research, which is essentially anchored in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995, 2003; Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard 1996) and content analysis (Cohen et al. 2007), proves that characters in children’s stories have been traditionally constructed through a language based on established and predetermined stereotypes. Thus, the male characters take on more active roles and their actions affect other actants. The female characters, however, appear to be more focused on pleasing or liking the other participants that surround them. Male characters outnumber females in these children’s narratives, both in the linguistic mode and in the illustrations, an aspect that has implications for the gender image that is constructed by the child. Women are usually ignored or not sufficiently considered in books intended for this audience consisting of children. Today, although the ratio of male to female characters in stories is similar, at least in quantitative terms, and since the 1980s feminist stories have been published that extol the role of the female figure (Prince Cinders (1987) or Princess Smarty Pants (1986) by Babette Cole are examples of this), the male figure continues to prevail over the female one in picture books; or, at least, linguistic resources are used that still impoverish the representation of the female characters in children’s narratives (Sunderland 2012: 19, 36).
Moreover, the concept of genre in picture books has not only been approached at the individual level of the character, but also at the family level, a unit which has undergone substantial changes, considering the new family formats that are emerging in today’s society. We refer, in particular, to same-sex parent families. This change has had direct repercussions in social, political and also literary areas. In fact, in the most recent decades picture books have been published that address this issue, probably aiming at presenting the child with a reality that, whether we agree with it or not, is part of the twenty-first-century society (Sunderland 2012: 143). As with the emergence of non-sexist stories after the 1970s and 1980s, associated with feminist liberation movements, the arrival of stories illustrating same-sex parent families came in the 1980s after the gay liberation movement.
The first book with this topic was published in 1983, Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, written by Susanne Bösche and illustrated by Adreas Hansen. However, between 1983 and 1987, due to the spread of AIDS and the responsibility attributed to homosexual couples in the development of the disease, some negative attitudes towards homosexuality emerged (Sunderland and McGlashan 2013, 2015). Since then, although, unfortunately, not always successful, attempts have been made to introduce picture books that portray children living in same-sex parent households into schools, basically in order to promote the acceptance of all types of families existing in our society. Sunderland (2012: 143 and ff), in collaboration with McGlashan, carried out a study on the content of picture books that feature same-sex-parent families and promote the acceptance of gay couples with biological or adopted children. Among other aspects, they analyse the realistic or fantastic nature of the stories, their images (specifically, the number of times characters establish physical or emotional contact), their linguistic component (the types of verbs that are used to express affection) and, above all, the narrative strategies used by authors to promote the acceptance of same-sex parents and create a positive image of the gay identity.
Although the research carried out on picture books portraying same-sex-parent families from a content and linguistic perspective is certainly conclusive, it is also true that despite the multimodal nature of picture books, more attention needs to be paid to the meaning that comes from the interaction of images and text in these literary works. In this sense, Sunderland (2012: 52) highlights the need to adopt multimodal approaches that complement those traditional narrative theories which have focused mainly on the study of literary and content issues when analysing contemporary picture books. For this reason, in this book, special attention is given to the analyses of the meaning that is created from the word-image interaction in a large sample of stories that feature children who either live in sex-same family households or who do not necessarily conform to the macho or female stereotypes typically associated with their gender in traditional narratives. These multimodal analyses reveal how the verbal and visual modalities contribute to each other’s meaning and make evident the potential of combining words and images in picture books.
