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mike: Hannah Monroe graduated from Warren Wilson College in December with a double major
in Environmental Studies and Sociology & Anthropology. Hannah's research focuses on ecofeminism and
animal studies, looking at how ideas about animals inform those about gender and
depictions of animals in the media. Hannah is interested in feminist approaches
to animal rights activism and plans to work in animal rights activism and then eventually
go to graduate school for a PhD in sociology, focusing on ecofeminism, animal studies, and veganism.
So Hannah, you are ready to go and just give me a cue for your presentation.
Hannah: Okay great, thanks. Can everybody hear me? Great. You can put up my presentation now.
Thank you. This is based on a project that I did which was a content analysis
of animals in children's picture books and I was looking at the best-selling books from 2001 to 2010 and the 10 best-selling
books per year. I was really interested in how anthropomorphized animals are gendered and
so I did content analysis of gender expression in animals and gender representation.
For my research I chose this topic because I was really interested -- Oh, sorry, how can I make this better?
mike: So Hannah, if you just maybe lean into the camera a little bit more. How is that everyone?
Hannah: Can you hear me better now? Okay great thanks. I was very interested in both animal studies and gender studies
and I was looking for a way that I could put these together, so I chose this topic on animals and children's picture books.
In this presentation I will look at the implications for animal rights issues in more detail as well, in how we portray them.
Here are some pictures from my content analysis that I found. For my theoretical
approach, the first approach I used was around gender socialization and performance. I looked
at gender schema theories, from Sandra Bem, which is the idea that people develop gender
schema, which are networks of associations that are internalized and shape understandings
of the world and regulate behavior. I'll so used West & Zimmerman's idea of doing gender,
which is that norms are social created and naturalized through interactions, being continuously
maintained. And I also used Butler's similar idea that gender is a stylized repetition
of acts. And books play major role in children's socialization around gender.
The next approach I used was gender representation in books. In my research I found that in books,
children's books, women have been consistently underrepresented. And this happens especially
when characters are animals. Even nongendered characters often are gendered as male which
reflects Audre Lorde's idea of the mythical norm and the idea that people are assumed
to be white heterosexual and male. And I also found in the research that stereotypical depictions
of gender were common in these books and were consistent over time. And this underrepresentation
and stereotypical depiction of women can give children the impression that women are not
important. It's especially an issue because these books are best-selling books that I'm
studying. So this is really influencing children and these books are purchased a lot. A lot
of previous studies have focused on award-winning books. Which is interesting also because this
is about which books are being seen as really good books and even those books are very oppressive.
The last theoretical approach I used was around animal symbolism. Steve Baker says that animals
are reflections of our beliefs and human culture and that often the way they are depicted has
more to do with humans then with the animals themselves. In Ortner's essay "Is Female to
Male as Nature is to Culture", she talks about how nature is devalued cross culturally and
women are devalued cross culturally because they are associated with nature. Lerner and
Kalof argue this as well. And saying that women are seen as closer to nature. They say
that construction of gender onto nonhuman animals certainly contributes to maintaining
the salience gender distinction in human social life. So we use animals in a way that naturalizes
our social norms and naturalizes the gender distinction. And Carol Adams talks about this
as well saying that women are symbolically oppressed through depiction of animals and
in her book the *** Politics of Meat, she talks about how pronouns tend to be specific
to how we view animals so we gender animals as female when they are animals that we use
for food or products. And we gender animals as male when we are afraid of them. So this
is another way that gender is being naturalized through depictions of animals. McCabe et al.
say that the under- the consistent underrepresentation of females may reveal a subtle kind of symbolic
annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery. In this way animals in these children's
books are subliminal and overlooked because people don't associate animals with things
similar to human so they seem separate that they are not, they are influencing our society
and in fact, sometimes when people use animals in children's picture books, this is to avoid
stereotyping because they thought they could get around dealing with stories by using animals.
Actually this as we see from research ended up being more stereotypical. Also we use animals
to naturalize social norms because we see them as a closer nature and we associate nature
with morality. Gaard, Gianini and Parry all talk about how we project norms onto nature
in a way that seeks to naturalize them and is untrue. Duke also studies how animals really
behave in nature is not following the social norms that we project onto them, but this
idea that people call behavior 'unnatural'. It's not really unnatural, this is a social
construction. John Levi Martin also did similar research which was on Sociological Images
about class divisions of work with animals and he studied "What do people do all day"
by Richard Scary and he noted different animals were portrayed with different jobs and this
is naturalizing these jobs and naturalizing these class divisions.
This is my methodology for my study. I did a purposive sample of the top 10 best-selling
children's picture book per year which were about anthropomorphized animal characters
from the Library Book and Trade Annual, and I went through the best selling list and I
selected the ones about anthropomorphized animals that were children's picture books
and I studied these. I had 45 books total and 105 characters. There were 45 books total
because there were duplicates over the years. So some of these books are even more influential
because they are best-selling for many years a row. I did a quantitative content analysis.
I was looking for gender -- I operationalized gender as male, female and nongendered. I
measured sex typing on a scale. Sandra Bem defined sex typing as the way we attach masculinity
and femininity to male and female. I looked at gender in text and signifiers. Text as
in pronouns and signifiers as in visuals that we see as being masculine and feminine. Originally,
I was going to look at text, but signifiers is also important because most people assume
these things so we need to look this as well.
I measured sex typing through gender attributes that were expressed. For example, the masculine
attributes I was looking for were independence, directiveness, competitiveness. And then feminine
attributes were dependent, submissiveness, emotionality. And I had a scale that was from
strongly sex typed to strongly opposite sex typed. So strongly sex typed would be strongly
masculine men and strongly opposite sex typed -- very feminine men, or very masculine women.
And then I has non sex typed in the middle.
For my instrument, first I had book information, title, author, best-seller year, etc. And
gender of author and illustrator, because I was interested in that representation as
well. I looked at gender of major and tertiary characters. And I identify the gender in text
and signifiers. I counted expression of gender attributes. And I would like tally how many
times I saw the gender attributes expressed by the characters in pictures and in text
and then I put them on a scale and I made a scale where I made -- subtracted them to
see how different the total for masculinity and femininity were. And then I measured sex
typing where if it was between zero and five, the character was non-sex typed and if the
difference was between five and 10 they were somewhat sex typed or somewhat opposite sex
typed and if 10 or more they were strongly sex typed or strongly opposite sex typed.
These are my findings. My findings reveal a lot of underrepresentation of female characters.
The blue represents male characters and the green represents female characters. Females
were underrepresented. 89.5% of total characters were male, and only 10.5% were female. There
was no representation of characters who were not gendered, in either text or signifiers.
Also interestingly I looked at tertiary characters and gender representation of them. For them,
there were 147 male characters and 141 female characters and 72 nongendered characters,
and so in this we can see there is more representation of female and nongendered characters in less
important roles and so you ask the question of what will children be getting from this.
They see that women are being portrayed in less important roles and that is where they
have more representation.
The representation of female and nongendered characters didn't change at all over the decade.
Here you can see that the blue line at the top is male characters over the decade and
the green at the bottom is female characters. There was also no change in overall sex typing
of characters over the decade. Here on this graph you can see sex typing representation,
49.5% of characters were sex typed and 33.3% were nonsex typed and only 17.2% of characters
were opposite sex typed.
Also, my study found that there was greater diversity in female gender expression over
the decade than with male characters. This could also be due to low end values because
there was just so few female characters to study that the results might be skewed by
that and you can see here that the green line represents female characters and that moves
from one being strongly opposite sex typed to five being sex typed and it moves around
a lot on the screen where as the blue line represents male characters stays around somewhat
sex type throughout the decade. And it's the average. When the green line breaks there,
that's where there were no female characters at all in these books, for 2002 and 2003.
I also found underrepresentation of female authors. 52.4% of characters were in books
by men and 40% were in books by women. The interesting thing I found is that female authors
were more likely to write about female characters and 11.9% of female characters were in books
by women whereas 5.5% of female characters were in books by men and this difference is
especially apparent when looking at sex typing. 38.1% of opposite sex type characters were
in books by women whereas only 3.6% were in books by men. And the P value for this is
.001. So there is a very significant difference. This really demonstrated that maybe if there
were more books by women we would see more diversity of character representation. So
here are more pictures. Limitations on my study are potential gender bias although I
constructed my study to reduce bias. There also could have been some sampling error and
my studies cannot be applied to humans because as I saw in my research, representation of
gender is different with human and animal characters so an interesting topic for future
research could be comparing these, with the same books. Or over the same decade and seeing
if there is a difference. Also these cannot be applied to books that are not bestselling.
I will talk about LGBTQ representation in these books looking at naturalization of social
norms and how this may affect children. These representations naturalize heteronormativity.
This book, And Tango Makes Three, has been banned, on banned booklists, particularly
because it's about animals and since we equate nature with morality and since people use
this kind of discourse when they talk about LGBTQ equality, this -- the animals have an
interesting role in this and how they are portrayed. So this book is helpful in deconstructing
these social norms and deconstructing this idea that nature reflects our society and
reflects our hegemonic norms.
I also wanted to talk lastly about this as an animal rights issue. This using animals
as symbols of hegemonic norms, is a paradox with the way that we devalue them in society.
Lerner and Kalof writes that we use them as symbols and allegories of the human social
world as well as marking them as other. So we're exploiting animals further in this way
and using them as images to oppress people in ways that they don't get their own autonomy
of behavior. We project our norms onto them in a way that is oppressive to people.
Also as Carol Adams shows in her work, the way that we gender animals influences the
way we treat them. Here's another form of exploitation of animals I think. This is the
way that also oppresses people. Also another example of *** issues, in the research,
was in this book in particular "Lily's Big Day", it focuses on marriage and this is another
example of naturalizing heteronormativity through animal characters. Thank you.
I tried to visual cues that are very common
in society like the kind of colors that male and female characters are wearing and
if those are stereotypical. And like other clothing characteristics because I was hesitant
to identify female and male characters visually in my study but in talking to my advisor about
it I realized that since most of the children looking at these books would identify characters
that way, I should do so to really get an accurate idea of how these animals are being represented.
But also I think this is a place where people have so much more autonomy in the way
they view these characters. Because you can read these characters how you want to even
though children will be socialized to read in certain ways.
(Reading question) "Do you get responses from libraries about your research?"
I haven't published my research yet so I haven't been in communication with libraries about that.
Someone asked, "Are you aware of any similar research done with children's characters in cartoons?"
I didn't really look much into because it wasn't in my scope of studies for this project,
I was mostly looking just at books. But I think it would be really interesting to do studies looking at
Disney movies as well and I'm interested in that, and in cartoons.