Estereotipos Étnicos y de Género (Coordinación)

Stereotypes are collective conceptions rooted in a society about how people who belong to certain sexual or cultural identities should be, act and behave. These ideas are the result of historical constructions and, when accepted without question, they become difficult to modify. Stereotypes, preconceived and socially accepted, tend to generate derogatory generalizations towards groups such as indigenous people, women or Afro-descendants, being transmitted from one generation to another in society (Quesada, 2014). At the gender level, the stereotype arises from the sexual division of labor as a result of the configuration of the roles of men and women within capitalist society, where men would have greater productive value than women ( Mazzei , 2013). The productive role is understood as the production of a material good and the reproductive role is generally linked to the reproduction of the species by women and their confinement within the home. The dominant view of the male gender promotes androcentrism, which consists of the overvaluation of men over women, causing them to be the center of the family, the work space and society in general (Fernández and Baeza, 2018). In the ethnic sphere, stereotypes are beliefs that lead one to perceive the supremacy of an ethnic group over other groups. These attitudes arise from the overvaluation of clothing, skin color, language and the role that the group plays within society ( Ledebko , 2010). Generally at the Ecuadorian level, the type of ethnicity that prevails is white and mestizo, the result of a colonial matrix where the whites and the “whitened” are over the indigenous peoples and Montubios (Soler, 2009). Stereotypes would be reproduced unconsciously through various means, among which the illustrations present in school textbooks appear. Illustrations are images printed in a text that serve to decorate, document, narrate and recreate content and contribute to visually project an idea or concept through the use of formal design elements, varied graphic styles, symbolism and abstractions ( Menza et al. al., 2016). They also have the objective of transmitting information between the sender (illustrator) and the receiver (observer) with the objective of delivering a message that in the case of this research is the idea of the supremacy of men over women and of white and mestizo culture. about.