ABSTRACT

In the past few decades important work has been undertaken to unsettle essentialist conceptualisations of gender/sex in the early years workforce. Through an auto/ethnographic diffractive engagement that thinks with feminist ‘new’ materialist and postcolonial scholarships, this paper uncovers the need to move beyond an exclusive focus on diversifying the workforce by simply increasing the number of men. Moving beyond the narrow focus enables a richer and more expansive understanding of gender/sex that exposes colonialism and reveals everyday practices of early childhood educators to be shaped by place, space and matter. By attending to how matter matters in early years, child-sized chairs are used as a point of entry into this research inquiry to explore how gender/sex is produced through pastpresent, material-discursive-affective and more-than-human entanglements. The paper proposes that complicating understandings of gender/sex is important to decolonise early childhood spaces, and so hold space for the emergence of difference that is unmodulated by whiteness. Recognising the agentic potential of matter further opens up possibilities for that which is not yet, but available to us, to make life more thinkable in cis-white heteropatriarchy.

摘要

在过去的几十年里，已经开展了重要的工作来扰乱早期劳动力中性别/性的本质主义概念。通过对女权主义“新”唯物主义和后殖民奖学金进行思考的自动/人种学衍射参与，本文揭示了通过简单地增加男性数量来超越对劳动力多样化的唯一关注的必要性。超越狭隘的焦点，可以更丰富、更广泛地理解性别/性别，这暴露了殖民主义，并揭示了幼儿教育者的日常实践是由地点、空间和物质塑造的。通过关注早年的重要性，儿童尺寸的椅子被用作这项研究调查的切入点，以探索性别/性是如何通过过去产生的，物质-话语-情感和超越人类的纠缠。该论文提出，对性别/性别的复杂理解对于早期儿童空间的非殖民化很重要，因此为不受白人影响的差异的出现留有空间。认识到物质的代理潜力进一步开辟了可能性，为我们还没有，但我们可以使用，使顺-白异父权制中的生活更值得思考。