Papers presented at the national seminar on 'Gender and Material Culture', held at Bhopal in March 2011.

This edited collection examines gendered representations of "evil" in history, the arts, and literature. Scholars often explore the relationships between gender, sex, and violence through theories of inequality, violence against women, and female victimization, but what happens when women are the perpetrators of violent or harmful behavior? How do we define "evil"? What makes evil men seem different from evil women? When women commit acts of violence or harmful behavior, how are they represented differently from men? How do perceptions of class, race, and age influence these representations? How have these representations changed over time, and why? What purposes have gendered representations of evil served in culture and history? What is the relationship between gender, punishment of evil behavior, and equality?

This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language and discourse work as `systems of representation'. Individual chapters explore: representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites; the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized `Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas.

Representations of gender in learning materials convey an implicit message to students about attitudes towards culturally appropriate gender roles for women and men. This collection takes a linguistic approach to exploring theories about gender representation within the sphere of education and textbooks, and their effects on readers and students within an international context. In the opening section, contributors discuss theories of representation and effect, challenging the conventional Althusserian model of interpellation, and acknowledging the challenges of applying Western feminist models within an international context. Following chapters provide detailed analyses focusing on a number of different countries: Australia, Japan, Brazil, Finland, Russia, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Germany, Qatar, Tanzania, and Poland. Through linguistic analysis of vocabulary associated with women and men, content analysis of what women and men say in textbooks, and discourse analysis of the types of linguistic moves associated with women and men, contributors evaluate the extent to which gendered representations in textbooks perpetuate stereotypical gender roles, what the impact may be on learners, and the ways that both teachers and learners interact and engage with these texts.