A Comparative Analysis of Gender Stereotypes in Children's Literature in Persian and English within the Framework of Cultural Linguistics

Gender stereotypes can be considered as one of the prominent concepts in the field of socio-linguistics. These stereotypes are found at all levels of language application, including children’s literature, and play an important role in the reproduction of sexist language and patriarchal discourse. Through a descriptive- analytic method, the present study aims to investigate the aforementioned stereotypes in forty children’s stories of age groups “A” and “B” and seeks to compare the amount and the types of common stereotypes within the cultural linguistics framework as proposed by Sharifian (2016). Then, a linguistic and cultural interpretation of the stereotypes will be provided. The results of this study indicate that although the amount of gender stereotypes in children’s stories has been diminished in the past decades, patriarchal discourse is still remarkably present on the deep structure level and encodes its values and criteria through the presentation of gendered frameworks and roles in language and affects the audiences.
 
1. Introduction
Amongst all kinds of tools for raising a child and passing on the accurate norms and beliefs, children's literature is of special importance as it is associated with words and plays a crucial role in forming the child's mental image of various concepts. While this field has been subdued until the past decade, new approaches consider children’s literature in line with other literary genres bearing textual and meta-textual relations. The issue of gender and hence gender stereotypes has arisen in critique and literary theory from mid-twentieth century and is regarded as one of the fundamental categories which has tremendous impact in the process of child's socialization and subjectivity. Therefore, the present study aims to compare gender stereotypes within a total number of eighty stories in English and Persian story books of age groups A and B within the framework of cultural linguistics in order to answer the three basic questions of the study which involve the similarities and differences between the gender stereotypes used in story books of the age groups A and B in Persian and English, in addition to the linguistic interpretation of these similarities and differences in these two languages and also the cultural interpretation of the similarities and differences in these works In response to the above mentioned questions "ethnographic-conceptual text/visual analysis", a highly effective method for a comparative study, has been employed to compare both linguistic and cultural interpretation of stories in Persian and English.
 
2. Theoretical framework
Stories in both age groups of Persian and English are examined within the framework of Cultural Linguistics, as it is one of the branches of cognitive linguistics and studies the intersection of language, cultural and cultural conceptualizations. Cultural conceptualizations refer to the kinds of human experiences, constructed by the culture of societies and encoded in language. Many of the characteristics of human languages are embedded in cultural conceptualizations. Cultural linguistics identifies, describes and analyzes these conceptualizations in human languages (Sharifian, 2017a, P:9).
The term refers to fundamental cognitive processes including »schematization«, »categorization« and »metaphors«. In cultural linguistics, schemas are considered as building blocks of cognition that help human being organize, interpret and communicate information. There are 5 types of schemas namely event schemas, role schemas, image schemas, proposition schemas and emotion schemas. Categorization is another form of conceptualization and is the most fundamental human cognitive activity which begins early in life. Another area of language through which cultural conceptualizations encode concrete experiences is the domain of metaphor. In cognitive linguistics, this form of conceptualization is referred to as a "conceptual mapping" or "conceptual metaphor"(Sharifian, 2011, P: 23).
 
3. Methodology
As the research is targeted on the study of 20 stories in each age group of each language, these stories were selected in a randomized manner and examined in the most suited framework of cultural linguistics through a qualitative content analysis. In order to answer the research questions, firstly cultural categories, cultural schemas, and cultural metaphors related to gender stereotypes were identified in the stories and then classified into six categories of family, personality and behavioral characteristics, occupational roles, space, toys, animals, and surreal beings. Then the size of each category in each age group and language besides their similarities and differences were compared to see if there is a meaningful difference in the number of cultural conceptualizations related to gender stereotypes in the stories of the two languages. In the next step and in response to the other two questions of the research, linguistic and cultural analysis of similarities and differences in cultural conceptualizations were presented in both textual and visual contexts.
 
4. Results & Discussion
The findings suggest that despite the existence of gender stereotypes in the stories of both age groups of Persian and English, the rate and the variety of these stereotypes in cultural categories and schemas in Persian stories were dramatically more than English ones both in texts and pictures. Also, the stereotypes seem to be more deeply rooted, more radical and located in concealed linguistic and cultural layers in Persian stories. English has been able to create a minimal context for gender stereotypes by creating new situations and new language; thus, children's stories in Persian require more serious efforts by the authors and cultural programmers.
 
5. Conclusions & Suggestions
Results of the analysis of gender stereotypes in children’s stories of Persian and English based on cultural linguistics has revealed the fact that alongside with the differences in cultural conceptualization in the two languages, there are similarities such as the »occupational role« which is the most repeated category in both languages.
The gendered structure exists in both lexical and grammatical levels of both languages and is constantly reproduced. Although there are no such things as gendered pronouns (third person singular in English) or gender markers within a word in Persian, gendered constructs generally appear in larger linguistic units. However, such constructs are still present in English, they do not have much of a conceptual impact and can be said to have been inactivated and largely lost their discriminatory gender sense.
Also, studying the conceptualizations in terms of the limitations indicated that the substructures and potentials in Persian stories were far less than the English one. Thus, the result of confluence of language, culture and thought in Persian reflects the mental, cultural and social structures that, in turn, do not allow women to emerge both personally and socially. However, the results of the efforts made in English over the years have come to be seen with a more lively and productive language.
Meanwhile, extending the scope of the present study in terms of sample size and content could be a remarkable point considering further studies as examination of children's stories in other higher age groups, moreover, expanding the scope of this comparison can be a valuable contribution to gender-based language research.
 
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