Exclusion as Political: Rebuilding the American Masculine Identity Through High School History Textbooks

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Sarah J. Clifford

• This thesis examines how high school history textbooks’ depictions of the War on Terror reinforce the construction of an American masculine identity. Using a critical discourse analysis, it charts how textbooks mobilize the American identity around the tools of linking, differentiation, and hierarchization to legitimize its foreign policy through the construction of a “Self” and an “Other”. In identifying how textbooks are simply an “arm of the state”, this study displays how, through discursively enacting narratives that rely upon this construction, textbooks act as a site that help to reconstitute and rebuild the American masculine identity. In sum, this thesis demonstrates how not only is the state gendered, but so too are textbooks.

• Date created

  2020-04-26

• Subjects / Keywords

  • American identity; post-structuralism; high school history textbooks; gender

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-hdbf-z586

• License

  Public Domain Mark 1.0