König, Lotta: Creating Gender-Awareness By the Use of Literature: A Concept For Foreign Language Teaching

Gender relations significantly structure the everyday reality of teenage learners and are part of (inter-) cultural negotiations – dealing with this topic should thus have a permanent place in the foreign language classroom. Approaching it through literature is suitable, since this makes possible an analysis of images of gender written into the text while at the same time offering students a protective space: the foreign language and the fictionality of the text help learners deal with representations of gender identities and relationship possibilities in a save way. Thus, the fields of Gender Studies, Literary Studies and Didactics are brought together in this dissertation in order to come up with a concept that attempts to show how a critical understanding of gender can be fostered in the foreign language classroom.