Description
My thesis examines how scholars evaluate gender bias, representations of race/ethnicity, and sexuality in children's picture books. I review scholarship analyzing picture books by focusing on studies published in the United States between 1970 and 2009. I explore the variables that scholars examine in picture books (e.g. appearance, personality characteristics, language, occupations, cultural representations). Basing my thesis on feminist theoretical framework by Kimberle Crenshaw and Deborah King, I investigate whether scholars evaluate picture books from a monist perspective (focusing only on one theme such as gender) or from an intersectional perspective (focusing on multiple themes such as gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality). I also discuss the differences in how scholars evaluate picture books now compared to earlier studies in the 1970s. My research demonstrates that most scholars examine children's books from monist perspectives; they focus on one theme and some briefly mention other themes. My thesis is unique in that I evaluate the method of study that scholars utilize; I examine how and what in picture books scholars study. Most scholars follow the formula of summarizing previous research studies and then analyzing picture books. But unlike my thesis, not a single scholar has analyzed how other scholars examine picture books In conducting this meta-analysis, I discovered that scholars examining gender bias focused largely on quantity (frequency of female versus male characters) and quality (what roles female and male characters play). Scholars examining racial bias focused almost entirely on quantity (frequency of characters of color in books). Additionally, most scholars analyzing race/ethnicity focused on representations of African-American characters only. Very few studies examined multiethnic representations in general and very few studies examined representations of characters of color other than African-American. Scholars examining sexuality focused mostly on quality (whether or not gay/lesbian characters were portrayed positively) and none have focused on bisexual or transgender characters. In the final analytical section of my thesis, I evaluate six picture books from an intersectional perspective. Some of the books I chose to evaluate were examined by other scholars; I compare what they examined and what they omitted.
