This article explores the construction of gendered ethnicity in some

of the characters portrayed in readers used in the lower classes of

the Swedish comprehensive school. The purpose is to show how

what I call “critical intersectional discourse analysis” can be used on

textbook content. The analysis sheds light on underlying ideals and

values in hegemonic discourses, and the very complex ways these

values combine intersectionally, to construct the characters in the

analysed texts. Text and illustrations

are seen as interacting parts of

a whole and as part of a greater societal context. At the same time,

the analysis demonstrates how historical and contemporary

discourses influence text content. These discourses create contradictory

meanings and identities, as well as certain power relations,

within the text as well as in relation to different readers. The

preferred reading inevitably transforms the majority’s ways of

behaving into a generalised norm. The configuration of characters

presented in the textbooks thereby stereotypes and marginalizes

characters who differ from majority norms, creating a coding of

the world into “us and them”. The focus in this study is on the way

certain children presented in the readers are constructed as

deviations, who are implicitly contrasted to an unarticulated

heteronormative adult Western norm, and therefore inevitably

positioned as subordinated in relation to that norm.