The purpose of this study was to investigate if and how the picture book about Alfons Åberg express gender stereotypes and sexuality, through its images and texts. That is because it is one of the most borrowed books in Swedish libraries and also there fore could be a book that is especially common i Swedish preschools. The books about Alfons has also played a major role in Swedish cultural history and the Swedish history of literature, and are known as a part of the swedish heritage. Since children books are well used in Swedish preschools and because children often are left alone to read, we wondered what kind of gender norms the books of Alfons could express to the preschool children.

There- fore the aim of this study is to investigate how gender norms are expressed in two of the Alfons books in the book series. The survey was conducted through qualitative picture book analysis which is inspired by former text and image analysis. The theoretical method to investigate how gender norms were expressed was gender theory. We also used discourse analysis and social constructivism as a base, which means that the norms are defined as a social construction that are under constant transformation.

The results show that sex, gender and sexuality are interacting in the books of Alfons Åberg. The characters in the book expressed that sex and gender norms were expressed by separation of male and female. The separation find out to be a way to show that opposites also expect to attract each other. The conclusion was that sex, gender and heterosexuality were linked together as a normative exclusion of other sexualitys as inpossible.