TOYS AS SOCIAL AND GENDER REPRESENTATION IN CHILDHOOD

Authors

  • José Leonardo dos Santos Soares Universidade Federal da Paraíba
  • Danielle Barbosa Lins de Almeida

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26512/discursos.v3i2.2018/11774

Abstract

In today's contemporary world, characterized by discussions that bring to light the multifaceted and multi-racial nature of society, the representativeness in toys still shows itself to be uncommon (ALMEIDA, 2017). For our research, we will consider toys as semiotic representations, in the sense that they give meaning to society, reflecting its roles, technologies, identities, and practices (CALDAS-COULTHARD; van LEEUWEN, 2002). Toys such as the collection MyFamilyBuilders©, in which it is possible, through various magnetic wooden pieces, to build families with different genres, ethnicities and characteristics, propose to the toy market to expose a reality socially perceived. Therefore, we will consider the collection of MyFamilyBuilders© toys as an object of analysis, focusing on its multimodal aspects and bringing to the fore relevant themes such as representativeness and diversity. For this, we will use the Visual Design Grammar of Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996, 2006) and its representational, interactional and compositional metafunctions. The results of the analysis of the toy images point to a representation of the family that escapes the concept of nuclear family and embraces the diversity of the contemporary family, impacting on the current scenario of toys.

 

Key-words: Toys; Multimodality; Representativeness; Family.

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Published

2018-12-18

How to Cite

Soares, J. L. dos S., & Almeida, D. B. L. de. (2018). TOYS AS SOCIAL AND GENDER REPRESENTATION IN CHILDHOOD. Discursos Contemporâneos Em Estudo, 3(2), 19–32. https://doi.org/10.26512/discursos.v3i2.2018/11774

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Articles