The unavoidable salience of gender: notes from Australian childcare work

Abstract

This article explores the gendering of work in Australian childcare settings from a post-gender perspective. Much early childhood research focuses on encouraging men into the field, seeing their presence as beneficial to the perceived worth of childcare work. Such research ignores how women’s gendered experiences, as the overwhelming majority of the workforce, are already shaping the field, creating an image of this work apparently unpalatable to most men. I show how gendered relations have a profound impact, even in mono-gendered spaces like childcare, to the continuing disadvantage of women. Workers caught within binary understandings of gender appear to draw on normative gendered discourses to understand the social and economic positioning of the field, rather than more emancipatory framings. This article argues that perspectives that actively question biomedical understandings of gender can be useful in understanding and challenging the gendering of particular societal spaces, such as childcare services.

Resumen

Este artículo explora la generización del trabajo en el ambiente del cuidado de niñxs en Australia desde una perspectiva de post-género. Mucha investigación de la primera infancia se centra en alentar a los hombres hacia esta esfera, al verse su presencia como favorable para el valor percibido del trabajo del cuidado de niñxs. Esta investigación ignora cómo las experiencias generizadas de las mujeres, siendo ellas la gran mayoría de la fuerza de trabajo, ya están dando forma a ese campo, creando una imagen de este trabajo como aparentemente no atractivo para la mayoría de los hombres. Muestro cómo las relaciones generizadas tienen un profundo impacto, incluso en espacios mono-genéricos como el cuidado de niñxs, desfavoreciendo a las mujeres. Lxs trabajadorxs atrapadxs en nociones binarias de género parecen basarse en discursos de género normativos para comprender el posicionamiento social y económico del campo, en vez de marcos más emancipatorios. Este artículo sostiene que las perspectivas que cuestionan activamente las nociones biomédicas del género pueden ser útiles para comprender y desafiar la generizacion de espacios sociales particulares, tales como los servicios de cuidado de niñxs.

摘要

本文从后性别的观点，探讨澳大利亚儿童照护安排中的工作性别化。早期的儿童研究，聚焦于鼓励男性进入该领域，并将其存在视为有益于儿童照护工作所感知的价值。此般研究，忽略了作为该劳动力压倒性的绝大多数的女性性别化经验，如何早已形塑着该领域，并创造出此一工作对多数男性而言显然不愉快的印象。我将展现，即便在诸如儿童照护的单一性别化空间中，性别化的关係如何对女性的持续不利具有深刻的影响。陷入性别二元理解的工人，似乎会援用规范性的性别化论述来理解该场域的社会和经济位置性，而非使用更具解放性的架构。本文主张，积极质疑性别的生物医疗理解之视角，对于理解和挑战诸如儿童照护服务等特定社会空间的性别化而言相当有用。

Keywords:

• Gender
• childcare
• post-gender
• workforce
• binary gender
• feminisation

Palabras claves:

• género
• cuidado de niñxs
• post-género
• fuerza de trabajo
• género binario
• feminización

关键词:

• 性别
• 儿童照护
• 后性别
• 劳动力
• 二元性别
• 女性化

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge Dr Kay Cook, and a number of anonymous reviewers, all of whom contributed their critical insights to this article.

Notes

1. In this article I will use a variety of language to describe the phenomenon of sex/gender, including language more commonly associated with ‘biological’ sex (e.g. female, male) and language that is more often used to signify gender (e.g. women, men). A post-gender perspective necessarily critiques the sometimes useful, but often arbitrary, distinction between sex and gender first brought to prominence by feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. Increasingly it is becoming clear that the idea of ‘sex’ differences are just as much culturally constructed as gender, and that constructing ‘sex differences’ as natural remains one of the key strategies for entrenching both the notion of binary gender embodiment, and the male power over women that this enables. There are an increasing number of articles by scientists, arguing for an end to narrowly focused research on sex/gender difference, such as this comprehensive critique of attempts by researchers to ‘find’ sex differences in the brain (Joel 2016).

2. Cisgender is a word used to describe people whose experience of their gender aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth, and so feel no or little gender dysphoria. This term was coined in the 1990s, and came into widespread usage from about 2006 with the rise of trans activism. Naming cisgender as a form of privilege that was previously invisible, has been an important way to explore issues around sex/gender privilege and discrimination. Note that someone who currently identifies as cisgendered may come to a point in their life where they realise their experience of embodiment, and body dysphoria, better matches that of other trans people.