Constructing gender in the Arabic textbook Al-ʿArabiyyah li al-Nāshiʾīn: Domestic subordination, gender stereotyping, and reader positioning

Debates concerning gender equality and justice extend to educational materials, including textbooks that may reproduce particular understandings of women’s and men’s social roles. This study examines women’s symbolic subordination in domestic activities, gender-based differentiation of activities, and the authorial and reader positions through which women’s association with domestic roles is potentially naturalized in the Arabic textbook Al-‘Arabiyyah li al-Nāshi’īn, Volume 2. Employing a qualitative approach with library research and document analysis, the study examines words, pronouns, demonstratives, kinship terms, clauses, sentences, and dialogues, drawing on Sandra Bem’s Gender Schema Theory and Sara Mills’ feminist discourse analysis. The findings reveal three patterns. First, female characters are consistently associated with routine domestic work oriented toward family service, whereas male characters are represented as engaging in more diverse intellectual, recreational, and technical activities. Second, symbolic gender differentiation is constructed by associating women with environmental cleanliness and men with vehicles. Third, representational choices involving gender markers, kinship terms, spaces, objects, and actions offer a reading position that may present women’s proximity to domestic work as natural. Gender bias does not reside in feminine or masculine grammatical markers themselves but emerges from their repeated association with particular roles and activities. The study concludes that the textbook has the ideological potential to reproduce patriarchal gender relations, although it does not establish that learners necessarily accept or internalize these representations. The findings contribute analytical categories for gender-sensitive textbook evaluation and support the development of more inclusive Arabic-language teaching materials.