Familiar play: age-coded heteronormativity in Swedish early childhood education

ABSTRACT

Focusing on children’s play, the present article explores how 3- to 6-year-old children (re)produce, (re)negotiate and challenge heteronormativity in a Swedish Early Childhood Education setting. The article is based on ethnographic data, focusing on (re)production of heteronormativity in a particular kind of idealized, often feminine-coded and peer-group play with a low degree of teacher participation, labelled ‘Mum, Dad, Child play’ by the children. Our results show that children’s play is structured by certain themes, such as family and home, and certain gendered and/or age-coded positions, such as mother, father, child or baby. Age difference (child/adult) proves to be the cornerstone of the heteronormative family metaphor of the play, where the child/baby position is central. To describe the intersections of age, gender and sexuality in our analysis, we suggest the use of the concept of age-coded heteronormativity.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• play
• heteronormativity
• age categorization
• Queer theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Also known as ‘home corner play’ or ‘domestic play’ (Taylor and Richardson 2005); here we have chosen to use the expression used by the children in the study.

2 Corsaro (2003) defines ‘role play’ as socio-dramatic play ‘in which children take on or embody roles that exist in society (like mothers, fathers, or various occupational roles)’ (91). According to Corsaro, children do not only imitate adults in their role play, but also challenge and elaborate these roles.

3 The topic of the conversation was to talk about MDC play, and questions were directed at the logic of the play. However, it is not possible to know at all times whether Ida and Allan are still talking about the MDC play here or about family in general.