The Construction of Gender Identity in Textbooks at the Intersection between Gender Ideology and Neoliberal Ideology: A Comparative Analysis of Textbooks for Teaching Italian and Serbian as Foreign Languages

This paper aims to analyse the elements of gender ideology and neo-liberal ideology in a corpus composed of three Italian and two Serbian as a foreign language textbooks. The focus of the study is centered on the representation of activities related to the purchase of clothes and accessories, analysed from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. The results indicate that neoliberal values are sustained through the idea that women are naturally predisposed to be clothes and fashion consumers. On a broader scale, the results implicate that the educational materials taken into examination lack a critical pedagogy approach, and that they do not employ the critical and the transformative potential of education, instead they are limited to the reproduction of dominant ideologies.