Gendered Politics of Pictures: How Images in a Pakistani English Textbook Homogenize Female Identities

Authors

• Liaquat Ali Channa, Department of English Language and Literature, Government College, University Hyderabad, PakistanFollow

Abstract

This qualitative multimodal analytical study draws upon Kress and van Leeuwen’s ideas about pictures and problematizes textbooks of English that supposedly teach only English in Pakistan. It aims to understand the identities of an adult female as shown in the images of an English textbook. It uses Foucault’s theories of discourse and discursive formation, and a Vygotskian sociocultural view of the development of consciousness. By following Braun and Clarke (2006, 2019), all the pictures of the My English Book 4 are first analyzed thematically. Later, O’Toole’s (1994) method of analyzing pictures is employed for a detailed examination of a representative image chosen purposively from the leading theme. The study attempts to know how images/illustrations used in the English textbook perpetuate a certain gender ideology. The meticulous multimodal analysis demonstrates that the image of a housewife identity communicates to students beyond English by advocating a certain ideology of female identity pervasive in today’s Pakistan. The study implies that the multimodal images of the book are not innocent; they have an embedded prescriptive hidden curriculum of their era and area.

Keywords

female identities; English in Pakistan; multimodal images in English text-books; Foucault; Vygotsky; discursive formation

Author Bio(s)

Liaquat Ali Channa currently serves as Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English, Government College University Hyderabad, Pakistan. Being an educational linguist, he is interested in the intersection of language and education, including language in refugee education, language textbooks, language teacher identity, language in education policy and planning, and English as a/the medium of instruction. He was the Syed Babar Ali Postdoctoral Fellow at Mittal Institute, Harvard University, USA. As a Fulbrighter, he completed his Ph.D. in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA، USA. As a co-editor, his book with Routledge, Decolonizing English Language Textbooks, is coming this March in 2026. Please direct correspondence to channauga@gmail.com

Publication Date

5-8-2026

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Recommended APA Citation

Channa, L. A. (2026). Gendered Politics of Pictures: How Images in a Pakistani English Textbook Homogenize Female Identities. The Qualitative Report, 31(5), 5778-5800. DOI: https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2026.8265

ORCID ID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4147-0351