Muscular superheroes and girly ducks: Gender talk using comics in the classroom

This paper explores how participants in a Swedish secondary school do gender talk with comics. Swedish schools are tasked with working with gender, but this can be a challenge for many teachers, and finding materials to work with gender aspects can be difficult. Meanwhile, literary research on comics has shown them to be a potential tool for problematising gender, but little educational research has investigated the gender discussions that comics can promote. Therefore, using conversation-analytical methodology, we have documented situated classroom talk through video observations, focusing on the social construction of gender. Five excerpts are shown, where different aspects of gender talk are displayed and discussed. Results indicate that although students deconstruct and criticise gendered binaries in characteristics and behaviour from comics' imagery, this critique remains superficial, revolving around the hypersexualised body imagery of the muscular superhero the Phantom or the outdated femininity of the girly Daisy Duck. Although comics present an opportunity for discussions of norm critique in the classroom, we suggest that more social-realistic comics, wherein gender roles are more subtle and nuanced, be used for furthering the research on this topic and allowing students more width when it comes to deconstructing gender binaries.