Gender Perspective in Design and Illustration of Children’s Books

(Case Study in Biographical Children’s Books of Influential Female Figures in Indonesia)

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211228.057How to use a DOI?

Keywords

children book biography; neutral gender; gender design; children book illustration; children book design

Abstract

Children’s books industry is vastly developing in recent years. Studies on design and illustration of children’s books have to be conducted in regard to varied perspectives that keep up with the times. One of these perspectives is gender. In children’s book, gender perspective is essential because books influence greatly on shaping children’s view about gender, apart from parents and environment. Gender responsive values, such as free of stereotypes and gender bias, as well as supporting gender equality, will help children to optimize their unlimited potentials. Gender reponstive books will deliver inclusive contents that lead to diverse subjects of children’s books and wider targeted readers. Design and ilustration play a big role to show those gender responsive values. In this research, observation and analysis of design and illustration in children’s books are applied using gender perspective. Analysis and observation are conducted to answer whether the design and illustration affected the content to be gender neutral or not. Moreover, this paper would give the suggestion on how to eliminate the gender bias and stereotypes in biographical children’s books. Gender concept, neutral-gender design and children’s book illustration theory are the basis of this anaylsis. The books analysed here are those included in biographical genre that presents influential female figures in Indonesia. We chose this genre because it shows the depiction of figures that support gender equality. The result is design and illustration analysis in National Heroes Series R.A. Kartini and Cut Nyak Dien published on 2020 by Bhuana Ilmu Populer publisher. The analysis on those two books will be compared with the one from the series that feature male main figure. We found there are many stereotypes and gender bias. This pattern can be altered in some points, such as figures selecting and content developing. The content of children’s biographical books can be changed according to the trend in children’s book industry in Indonesia. Therefore we need further studies in design and illustration for child readers and development in interactive digital books format.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Cintantya Sotya Ratri
AU  - Riama Maslan Sihombing
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/12/28
TI  - Gender Perspective in Design and Illustration of Children’s Books
BT  - Proceedings of the ICON ARCCADE 2021: The 2nd International Conference on Art, Craft, Culture and Design (ICON-ARCCADE 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 436
EP  - 445
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211228.057
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211228.057
ID  - Ratri2021
ER  -