Investigating+Gender+Stereotypes+-+Activity

Kathleen Laide and Stefan Wasylyk
 * Investigating Gender Stereotypes - Activity (Introductory to Text)**

Our activity “station” will deal with issues of gender, exploring the theory of critical literacy (as given earlier in the presentation) in order to illustrate how we often take the drastic differences between the depictions of men and women, even in literature, for granted. In order to do so, we will give the students a text that is heavily inflected by gender (an excerpt from Jane Austen’s //Pride and Prejudice//), and have them use it to contrast the construction of men and women in literature. We have chosen this text because of Austen’s status as a great female writer, but also because it is an example of how even female authors are often entrenched in systems of belief – especially regarding gender roles – that must be questioned.

Basically, our activity directs an application of critical literacy towards a classic work in the English canon, and more specifically, in the canon of English female writers. In order to “shock” students out of their regular perspective, we will have them look at the assigned passage and reverse the genders of the characters: a male student will read the female parts out loud, while a female student will read the male parts out loud. We have also included a re-gendered version of the text that students will look at. While they look at these texts, students will be asked to think about what this kind of reading does to the text i.e. does the reading shock them out of familiar assumptions about who women are and who men are?

Following this reading, we will pose a number of questions designed to prompt students towards applying techniques of critical literacy to the reading in question. These include:
 * What is this text about? How do we know?
 * Who would be most likely to read and/or view this text and why?
 * Why are we reading and/or viewing this text?
 * What does the composer of the text want us to know?
 * How are adults constructed in this text?
 * How are the men constructed in the text? How are the women constructed?
 * Why has the composer of the text represented the characters in a particular way?
 * Are there ‘gaps’ and ‘silences’ in the text?
 * Who is missing from the text?
 * What has been left out of the text?
 * What questions about itself does the text not raise?
 * Whose views are excluded or privileged in the text?
 * Who is allowed to speak? Who is quoted?
 * What kinds of social realities does the text portray?
 * How would the text be different if it were told in another time, place or culture?

The aim of these questions, when used in conjunction with the text we have selected, is to demonstrate that even when a text features women in a prominent role, the text itself can be loaded with gender stereotypes and subtly enforce gender roles which the reader may not be aware of initially.