ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on an empirical case study that demonstrates ideologies of gender identities of cultural others can be uncovered through foreign language literature for the development of ‘critical cultural awareness’. The study describes learners’ responses to an Argentinian short story in an undergraduate final year module in a British university. The study was testing a pedagogical tool implemented in a class of students learning the Spanish language with an intercultural focus. As the students read the short story in Spanish, they interconnected their personal experiences with the literary text in a network of links not only from within, but also outside and beyond it, and created a hypertextual mosaic of other (imagined and real) texts in the reading process. These texts (referred to as ‘student texts’ in this study) displayed essentialising notions of the subaltern Hispanic other, which dichotomised ‘us’ and ‘them’ in a process of othering. The chapter presents an analysis of these ‘student texts’ that arise out of the reading , whilst it seeks to develop Byram’s (1997) notion of critical cultural awareness with a view to refining it using the concepts of ‘ideology’ and ‘anti-essentialism’.
