As teacher students, we have on many occasions come across and studied different textbooks for religion. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to research how sex and gender are presented in the textbooks for the course “religion 1” in the Swedish upper secondary school. The two thesis questions are: How are sex and gender presented in two different teaching materials in the Abrahamic religions? How does school law's demands for equality manifest in the analysed textbooks? When limiting the scope of the research to get a manageable amount of data we chose two textbooks written after the new guidelines for the Swedish upper secondary school which took effect in the year 2011 and are used in the public schools in Gävle. Further limiting the amount of data we decided to only go into detail on the Abrahamic religions, which had dedicated chapters in each book. For the method we decided discourse analysis would be fitting as what we are researching is how sex and gender are represented in the text. As both textbooks contain images on almost every page we also use some methods for analysing images from the book Reading Images (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006). The results showed a heteronormative discourse which is present in both textbooks and is especially noticeable when describing the relationship between God and man. God is usually described with the pronoun He while humans present in the books are referred to as she. The discourse also changes depending on the topic. In the topic of describing the history of the religions men are more present, and in the rare cases when women are present the text doesn’t treat them as individuals. When discussing the present questions about feminism and changing the religions to fit the modern society are more frequent, but even here God is referred to as a man and it’s described that mankind - she - is supposed to follow and obey.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-29239 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Peltonen, Måns, Hammarström, Andréa |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Gävle, Religionsvetenskap, Högskolan i Gävle, Religionsvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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