A Qualitative Content Analysis of Gender Representation in Aesop’s Fables for Critical Language Education

บทคัดย่อ

Aesop’s fables are widely used in language classrooms because their concise narratives and explicit morals support accessible reading and discussion. However, instructional stories also communicate social values, including gendered expectations. This study examines gender representation in a small corpus of Aesop’s fables through qualitative content analysis, with feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA) informing the interpretive framework. Ten fables containing explicitly gender-marked human roles were purposively selected from Townsend’s translation of Three Hundred Aesop’s Fables (1867/2004) in order to base the analysis on explicit linguistic evidence rather than inferred gender attribution to animal characters. The analysis focused on four dimensions: role positioning, action patterns, evaluative language, and moral framing. The findings reveal recurring gendered patterns in narrative representation. In the selected corpus, male characters tends to appear associated with livelihood labor, evaluative or instructive roles, and publicly visible action or consequence, whereas female characters more often appear in domestic or caregiving contexts and are frequently positioned within cautionary narratives in which planning, ambition, or judgment is morally evaluated. These patterns emerge through narrative distributions of agency and responsibility as well as through moral conclusions that guide readers’ interpretations of characters’ actions. Rather than advocating the removal of traditional texts from language classrooms, the study argues that Aesop’s fables can be productively taught through critical literacy approaches that encourage learners to examine how narratives represent identity, authority, and social responsibility.