Children’s picturebook on sexual educationas a cultural and political medium

Abstract

In my article I deal with a social construction of meanings of picturebooks’ content and form in Poland and abroad, so also with what kinds of discourses and ideologies determine the conditions of picturebooks’ production in societies under analysis. For the analysis I have chosen picturebooks which deal with sexual education. The methodology applied in the research consists mostly of content analysis and critical discourse analysis. The research is a part of a bigger collaborative project called “Discursive construction of subjectivity” financed by Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland, grant no. N 10702632/3637, and conducted at the University of Gdansk. I present, basing on the empirical material, the critique of the dominant discourse in Poland which is powerful in the production of picturebooks, which is based on the conservative ideology and social and sexual roles defined in stereotypical, hierarchical and heterosexual terms. In this aura discourses based on liberal or radical ideologies are marginalized.The results show the knowledge/power relations, symptoms of symbolic violence in exemplified discourses and explain to what practices of ideological and political control the subject is exposed. In this context a picturebook is seen as a meaningful cultural and political medium, within the content and form of which various (possible) ideologies and conceptions of the child are included to or excluded from social environment, what can occur as a real issue for educational theory and practice.