Beyond male recruitment: decolonising gender diversification efforts in the early years by attending to pastpresent material-discursive-affective entanglements

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Men in early years
• gender diversification
• diffractive analysis
• postcolonialism
• new materialism

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Professor Jayne Osgood, Scott Kerpen, and D Ann Williams for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article and to the anonymous peer-reviewers for their kind feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is in reference to the emergence of anti-trans sentiments on Twitter amid the global resurgence of BLM movement.

2 Metagender is a term that refers to individuals that are neither cisgender or transgender (Winters 2020)

3 The notion of ‘newness’ is a matter of contention as many non-western and indigenous communities have for long viewed the human and nonhuman as entangled and understood the agentic nature of the matter. King (2020, 58) contends that ‘it is precisely because white conquistadors and colonizers wiped out these indigenous worldviews that they can be rediscovered as new and novel’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sid Mohandas

Sid Mohandas is a doctoral researcher and a guest lecturer from the School of Education at Middlesex University, London.