Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the gender representations contained in six literarytexts suggested by the Ministry of Education for transition levels I and II of Preschool Education andthe first year of Primary Education, and their possible implications in the construction of children'sidentities. The research design is framed within the qualitative approach and proposes an interdisciplinaryanalysis to identify the semiotic resources that could shape a discourse that maintains and promotesgender stereotypes. This analysis integrates conceptual frameworks that look at literature as a means oftransmitting and creating identities; studies of gender representations in symbolic, visual and discursiveworks that shape the social position of men and women; and developmental approaches that studysubjectivities in childhood. The results show that some of the literary texts studied contain recurrentsigns and differentiatedidentification codes for girls and boys, which are constructed from a traditional,antagonistic and binary gender perspective, and some others tend to subvert this conventional order. Inconclusion, some texts propose reading options that tend to sustain conventional gender roles and othertexts open up new forms of representation.Keywords: Gender representations; identity construction; narrative literary texts; reading promotion plan;children ́s literature; early childhood.How to cite: Martínez-Palma, E., Rabanal-Gatica, D., Valenzuela-Rettig, P., & Fernández-Darraz, M. C. (2023).Gender representations and reading plan in Chile: literary corpus study for early childhood. Ocnos, 22(2).https://doi.org/10.18239/ocnos_2023.22.2.343This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)