“MOM’S IN THE KITCHEN!”: THE DISCURSIVE REPRESENTATION OF GENDER AND FAMILY IN CHINESE LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

As an educational resource, textbooks can function as political tools in the construction of knowledge and identity, especially for children with developing worldviews. Singapore, being a progressive but patriarchal society, holds a unique socio-political position towards family as a basic unit of society. That is, Singapore is forward in its desire for gender equality yet highly conservative in its definition of family. Based on this complex cultural sense-making framework, there is an apparent need for negotiation in the representation of gender and family in textbooks. Drawing on theories surrounding discourse and content analysis, this thesis investigates how gender and family were textually and visually characterized in government-authored Chinese Language textbooks for local secondary schools. In particular, the goals of my research are to understand how the idealized discourses were constructed, and how they were networked to produce gendered subjectivities for male and female characters. By analyzing four Chinese Language textbooks, I demonstrate that gender equality was ultimately sacrificed to inculcate the ideal patriarchal family. The findings, derived from examining the explicit and implicit representations of gender and family, evidence a bias towards ideologies that manifested an essentialist gender order. Most notably, the textual and visual narratives consistently reinforced reductionist discourses of women as weak, domestic, obsessed with beauty, and concerned with trivial affairs. These discourses were networked and uncritically interwoven with fundamentalist Asian discourses of family as patriarchal and transmitters of knowledge, values, and culture. Such representations were compliant with a patriarchal and conservative Singapore, rooted in Confucianism and traditions. This thesis proposes that the negotiation between family and gender ideologies found in the textbooks can unnecessarily (re)produce a dilemma for children in a globalized Singapore, who are developing their worldviews. It urges educators to be critical and sensitive to pedagogical representations of gender and family.