The Face of Society

Abstract

We have updated Ferree and Hall's (1990) study of the way gender and race are constructed through pictures in introductory sociology textbooks. Ferree and Hall looked at 33 textbooks published between 1982 and 1988. We replicated their study by examining 3,085 illustrations in a sample of 27 textbooks, most of which were published between 2002 and 2006. We found important areas of progress in the presentation of both gender and race as well as significant areas of stasis. The face of society we found depicted in contemporary textbooks was distinctly less likely to be that of a white man, very prominent in the 1980s texts, and much more likely to be that of a minority woman. Thus, while only 34 percent of the pictures of identifiable individuals in the textbooks examined by Ferree and Hall were of women, almost 50 percent of such pictures were of women in the recent texts. Moreover, while the percentage of white men portrayed dropped from about 45 percent to 30 percent, the percentage of portrayals of minority women rose from about 11 percent to 22 percent. Another sign of progress has been the decreasing likelihood of textbooks to depict race and gender as being nonover-lapping categories: while women of color apparently “had” only race in the sample examined by Ferree and Hall, they “had” both gender and race in the sample we studied. Still, our examination of pictures as a whole as a unit of analysis found that blacks continue to be more likely than any other racial group to be depicted in the presence of other racial groups and, thus, to idealize the degree of social integration in American society. We also still see non-white women enjoying very little (in fact, no) visibility in sections devoted to theory, despite developments in feminist theory, generally, and multicultural feminist, specifically. In general, though, our analysis suggests that the various criticisms of introductory texts that have appeared in this forum and others can have an impact on the content of those texts and, by extension, the sociology we teach.

Visualizing minority: Images of ethnic minority groups in Chinese elementary social studies textbooks

“…In the field of curriculum studies, textbook content analysis has been commonly used to examine the frequency and ways in which a variety of social groups are portrayed (Wade, 1993;Woyshner & Schocker, 2015). Curriculum scholars have found that information presented in textbooks often excludes or oversimplifies the experiences of marginalized social groups and contributes to perpetuating and reproducing the stereotypes and prejudices held by the dominant groups in the society (Avery & Simmons, 2000;Banks, 1969;Brown & Brown, 2010;Clark & Nunes, 2008;Field, Bauml, Wilhelm, & Jenkins, 2012;Journell, 2008;Suh et al, 2015;Woyshner & Schocker, 2015). For example, in his seminal study of the treatment of African Americans in 36 American history textbooks, Banks (1969) found that although textbooks did incorporate social problems related to African Americans, such as racism and discrimination, they failed to help students develop in-depth understandings of these issues.…”

Palestinian Erasure and Dehumanization in Introductory Sociology Texts

“…Little scholarship exists addressing settler colonialism in US introductory sociology textbooks. However, research addressing race and racism finds they often conservatively segregate these topics rather than theorizing them as structures holistically shaping all aspects of social life while idealizing racial integration through an uncritical lens of racial progress (Clark and Nunes, 2008; Ferree and Hall, 1996; Manza and Van Schyndel, 2000; Manza et al, 2010; Puentes and Gougherty, 2011; Seamster and Ray, 2018; Stone, 1996). Texts addressing Indigenous peoples erase or misname Indigenous communities, languages, culture, and history, and feature negative images reinforcing stereotypes of Indigenous people as pre-modern, uncivilized, and ‘other’ (Carroll, 2019; Steckley, 2003).…”