Reproduction of traditional ideas of gender discourse in children and adolescents’ writings

Since 1989, in addition to its cultural-literary content, the Speaking Doll journal has published manuscripts for children and adolescents in the form of stories and essays on specific topics. In these writings, child readers have appeared in the board of author. These texts can be analyzed from various dimensions. In the present study, the issue of how children and adolescents reflect their gender identity in their narratives and stories. Using Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis approach, children's autobiographical texts at three levels of description, interpretation and explanation have been studied and analyzed to show how their gender identity is represented. Gender identity is the most important part of any person's identity. What gender people are born with, from the very beginning, creates characteristics and traits for them and affects all aspects of their lives. Children regain their gender identity around the age of three, and especially in the final years of childhood, they begin to identify with their same-sex parent. The boy considers a male role model and the female considers a female role model. By reinforcing these patterns, they gradually acquire gender roles. Gender roles are a set of behaviors that any society, based on its definition of "masculinity" and "femininity", deems appropriate for people of that gender.  In recent years, there have been many changes in attitudes toward gender and gender roles in Iranian society and the family. Therefore, in view of these changes and distancing from the traditional approach of the patriarchal family, it seems necessary to examine the extent to which the perceptions of children and adolescents of their gender have changed today. 

 In this research, using Norman Fairclough theories and critical analysis of discourse, stories and writings (essays) of children and adolescents that have been published in the Speaking Doll journal from 2001 to 2009 have been reviewed. In addition to critical discourse analysis, some sociological and psychological theories about gender have been used. In this regard, we have faced the following questions:What are the most prominent gender characteristics that each child or adolescent writer has described for themselves?What is the gender role of children and adolescents in these stories?To what extent are the sentences, phrases and conversations of the characters in the stories influenced by gender stereotypes?What is the attitude of child and adolescent characters towards their homosexuality and the opposite sex in these stories?Given the vast changes that have taken place in the institution of the Iranian family in today's world, what is the reaction of children in their writings to gender stereotypes in the last two decades?According to the qualitative approach of the work, to answer these questions, using purposive sampling, we selected and reviewed 56 texts written by children and adolescents aged 7 to 17, of which 40 were story texts and 16 essay texts. These samples, which were selected from texts written by children and adolescents in the two decades of 2000 (20 cases) and 2010 (36 cases), each of them reflected the gender identity of their authors. It should be noted about the subject of this article; In other words, nothing has been done to analyze children's writings in Iran. 

In the stories of children and adolescents, the narratives of boys are often centered on their own gender, and in a few cases, such as the subject of the essay, etc., they comment on girls. But this is not the case with girls. Girls write texts in which the main characters and protagonists are boys, we also frequently encounter texts written by girls who wish to become boys when examining their stories and narratives.   In addition, in examining the important gender stereotypes that have been reflected in the writings of children and adolescents, we found that the extent and manner in which women's gender stereotypes are represented has changed greatly in the 2000 and 2010 decades. In the 2000s, most representations of women in texts were influenced by female clichés, housework, and since then, the clichés of woman, victim, and beautiful woman have been most reflected. But in the 2010s, representations of women stereotyped, the housework declined dramatically, and most representations of women were beautiful and passive woman. Also, for the female cliché, domineering / submissive, which was reflected in several texts in the 2000s, no examples were found in the texts studied in the 2010s. In the case of male gender stereotypes, too, most representations of male stereotypes in the 2000s were violent, with the stereotypes being much less represented in the 2010s. The stereotypes of man, the outside world, the strong man and the smart man have been the most frequent stereotypes since the 2000's. Also in the 2010's, the stereotypes of man, the outside world, the violent man and the working man were the most represented in addition, in the texts of the 2010s we encountered 7 cases of breaking or questioning a particular gender stereotype, which was one case in the texts of the 2000s.  It should be noted that these changes are related to a part of a story or narrative, and the child or adolescent author in other parts of his / her writing still reproduces the ideas of the traditional discourse of gender. In addition to what has been said, other results have been obtained from the analysis of the samples examined in the text of the research, including that in the studied texts, 14 stories and narratives have compared the two genders, of which 13 or 93% of them, considered the boy as the superior sex and only one case or 7% considered the girl as the superior sex. In addition, there is no mention of equality between the two sexes.
As a general result, it can be said that although Iranian society is moving towards modernity, and today, under the influence of the discourse of modern Westernism, we are witnessing changes in gender ideas, including changes in the gender roles of women in society, but the traditional discourse in Iranian society also plays a role in reproducing some of the gender stereotypes, and it can be well seen in the writings of children who are directly and indirectly influenced by this discourse. In other words, in the minds of children and adolescents, male and female roles are formulated separately based on the remnants of the patriarchal system.