A Multimodal Visual Grammar Analysis of Gender Representation in Egalitarian Tales – Cinderella's Riddle

This study aims to explore how gender roles are visually reconstructed in the rewritten Cinderella story published in the Egalitarian Tales series. This study offers a multimodal visual grammar analysis of the rewritten Cinderella story in the Egalitarian Tales series. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar framework (representational, interactive, and compositional metafunctions) and integrating socio-cultural semiotics and translation-as-rewriting perspectives, the paper examines how visual strategies reconstruct gender roles. Using three purposively sampled illustrations, coded via MAXQDA, the analysis demonstrates that images operate as ideological agents that can challenge traditional gender binaries and promote egalitarian social models. The findings suggest pedagogical implications for fostering critical multimodal literacy in early readers and highlight the significance of visual translation as a transformative tool in children’s literature, particularly in contexts seeking to promote gender equity and inclusive narrative representation.