A textual analysis of a sample of picturebooks with two-father familiesa multimodal discourse study

Abstract

This study attempts to carry out an analysis of the textual metafunction of three picture-books where the family model represented consists of two fathers and illustrate the three textual strategies that Sunderland and Mclashan (2012) propose to portray gay families: Daddy’s Roommate (1989), Daddy, Papa, and Me (2009) and Stella Brings the Family (2015). The article aims to be meaningful in understanding the construction of the non-traditional family discourse in children's picturebooks by deconstructing textual meanings. The ana-lytical tools employed in this study are Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Social Semiotics (2021) and Painter and others's (2013) approach to picturebooks. The results show that the three books deal differently with regard to the discourse of gay relationships, which can contribute to socialise children by offering different explicit/implicit strategies to under-stand non-traditional family models.