Gendered Lenses- An lesson plan that can be applied to any text.
How are bodies gendered?
90 minutes of an Introduction to feminist textual analysis. This lesson is the foundation
lesson designed to familiarise and get students considering the application of key
terminology to the text. Understanding, and application will enable students to begin to
access the texts they look at in class in far more complex, and exciting ways.
The Key Objective of this lesson is to develop Student’s analytical skills and textual
analysis of gendered roles, specifically the kinds of masculinities and femininities that
are being performed through narratives.
Links to AUSVELS are
 Navigate and read texts for specific purposes applying appropriate text
processing strategies (ACELY1702)
 Understand that patterns of language interaction vary across social contexts and
types of texts and that they help to signal social roles and relationships
(ACELA1501)
Key Terminology : Binary Opposites, gender performance, masculine and feminine.
Explanations of these terms, and applications to texts can be found on our website ‘Bring it’.
Rationale:
By giving students some fundamental definitions and explorations of these terms, teachers
will support students’ in focused analysis of set text through their understandings of these key
terms. This lesson can ideally be done in a double lesson, and the rewards for both teachers
and students will continue to be shown, as students have begun to utilise theoretical terms to
interrogate and draw out meaning from texts.
The first part of this class supports analytic group-based activities to consolidate what
students may already know about binary oppositions, and then introduce the new terminology
‘subversion of binary opposition’
For example. Start off with students as a class listing opposites.
Black/white
Sun/moon
Man/woman.
This binary pair is certain to come up. And it is the opportunity to then write underneath
‘feminine/masculine’
After ‘feminine/masculine’ has been named the activity switches dramatically.
Students are asked to discuss some of the traits of masculinity and femininity.
Strong/soft
Emotional/stoic
Brave/weak
Students are then asked to consider whether these traits are applicable to both the feminine
and masculine binaries.
Students are then asked to brainstorm in response to ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes
a woman’ Simone De Beauvoir.
PART A
is concerned with developing a feminist theoretical application that will be applied to the text
‘Wuthering Heights’. Students can now pick out the masculine traits and feminine traits in
both male and female characters in the novel and discuss. For e.g from the 2014 VCE List,
let’s discuss ‘Wuthering Heights’ through this feminist framework.
Heathcliffe
Male active alive broody complex misunderstood
Kathy
Female passive dead moody simple misunderstand
PART B
is concerned with moving from referencing and describing key traits to ‘interrogating’ and
‘re-positioning’ key traits. This lesson will move into the concept of ‘Gender performance’.
By now it is hoped that key masculine and feminine traits appear to cross over occasionally in
the text. Students are asked to assess the pairs, and must place one of the terms over the other
term, explaining why. Refer to the box above. Students are then asked to swap the characters
in the boxes around, so that Kathy becomes ‘active, broody, alive, complex’ and Heathcliffe
becomes the subordinate traits ‘passive, dead, moody’. Students are asked to find examples of
both masculine and feminine traits in the text related to the characters.
Questions to consider.
 ‘In what ways is Heathcliffe exhibiting masculinity?’ ‘Where is textual evidence of
this occurring?’
 ‘What ways is Healthcliffe exhibiting femininity?’
 where is textual evidence of this occurring?
Subverting the dominant paradigm.
The dominant paradigm is the box you have just made in class with your students, with the
dominant concept above. This concept is a paradigm, a seemingly self-contained stable
signifier from which all other meanings are off-shoots. The paradigm is the word, or idea that
is centralised, fixed and determines how we think about other terms related to it.
The point is to show that this fixed ‘term’ ‘paradigm’ is not fixed. It is un-stable, and
dependent on all the other ‘lesser’ terms connected to it and it is ARBITRARY. It has a fixed
position of dominance over time, but it is not an essential truth. Understanding dominant
paradigms is one of the key moments that will launch a textual analysis into the realm of first
year University level textual analysis.
It is worth persevering because once students have begun to understand ‘dominant
paradigms’, their level of comprehension, and critical analysis of power, language, narrative,
and subjectivity within texts and beyond has sky-rocketed beyond ‘themes, and character
traits’.
Having fun subverting!
Get your students to swap the terms around. And get them to re-consider the positive aspects
of these terms, or other words that might free these terms from the chains that bind them to
the master words.
This lesson plan is one step on the path to further analysis. It is designed to get students
teasing out associated masculine and feminine traits and find them in the texts, and making
the relations of power visible in a simple binary diagram. From there students are asked to
consider these relationships of power and what it looks like when the diagram is firstly
swapped, so that the master signifiers are below. Next students are asked to re-examine the
signifiers of femininity and masculinity and see how these terms are related to both males and
females in the text.
This foundation lesson plan on gender signifiers in texts, and binary oppositions, can now
move forward into an analysis of the variations of femininity and masculinity in the text. It is
important to allow students to tease out the ideas themselves. Deconstructive feminist
techniques ( in which they are now learning ) must be scaffolded clearly, and provide room
for discussion and guidance. It is essential that teachers have some foundational work in an
understanding of dominant paradigms, binary oppositions, and gendered narratives in order to
guide the lesson and give direction to the next layer of textual analysis, ‘gendered narratives’.
I recommend for further reading a classic text and easily readable, ‘Gender Trouble’ by Judith
Butler. Or for a semiotic framework, Saussure’s ‘Semiotics’. Another great book is ‘Sexual
subversions’ edited by Elizabeth Grosz.