“Fag, dude, dyke, fat or hot”. Word prevalence among high school students in terms of gender/sexual stereotypes

Abstract

Jón Ingvar Kjaran (jik@hi.is) is assistant professor at the University of Iceland,School of Eduation. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Iceland, School ofEducation. His research focus is on gender equa

The paper focuses on attitudes of high school students to stereotypes of appearances,gender and sexual orientation. 238 students in two high schools were asked toparticipate in a quantitative photo-survey. It consisted of seven photographs that wereselected by the authors and considered to be typical of certain characteristics, suchas sexual orientation, appearances, masculinity or femininity. Students were asked tomark a given word(s) that they thought was relevant to each image. The findings indicatethat there was a significant gender difference in the answers of the participants,when it came to the use of certain words in describing the photographs in the survey.Moreover, one could conclude that many characteristics of institutionalized heterosexism,were noted in attitudes and responses of the students, altough in varyingdegrees. Boys used for example more negative words about some of the photographsand they adopted rather than the girls the dominant discourse of femininity andmasculinity. Both sexes, however, were influenced by the dominant discourse aboutthe appearances, stereotypes of gender and sexual orientation, suggesting that thegender system continues to affect the culture of the high schools and the attitudes of their students.