World–Local Culture Clash and Compromise

Abstract This article analyzes the gender equality discourse in two generations of school textbooks from Afghanistan published between 2001 and 2021. Informed by world polity theory and employing a multimodal quantitative and qualitative content analysis, the study focuses on world–local culture interactions and their impacts on the conception of gender discourse in the textbooks. The findings indicate that world–local cultures compromise and clash at the same time, leading to both the coupling and decoupling of universal gender discourse in relation to local contexts. Against this backdrop, despite the consistency between said discourse and world culture, the textbook depictions render gender equality nominal and stereotypical, while the gender system therein is discriminatory against women.