Gender and Sexuality Studies

Abstract

This chapter re-turns to encounters in early childhood contexts as they are presented by a range of feminist new materialist scholars over the past decade. This body of work underscores the imperative to research gender and sexualities in ways that attend to the more-than-human. Our tracing illustrates that this emergent field of scholarship presents new and generative possibilities for opening out ideas and practices concerning how gender comes to matter in early childhood. Gender is understood expansively so that the organisation of space, the agency of matter, the significance of atmospheric forces that create possibilities to re-imagine gender and sexualities become central to investigation. Dwelling upon the feltness of encounters in early childhood contexts involves paying close attention to forces agitated from emerging, vanishing and transforming affective ecologies. Our objective in this chapter then, is to re-attune to spatiality, flows, intensities and affective stutters; to zoom in and out as a means to illuminate multiple and contradictory gendered forces at play, and to make visible what that might mean for research and practice. While some hegemonic gender formations continue to be privileged we explore how they are at once queered by other affective currents that present ways of becoming gendered otherwise.
Keywords: gender, affect, matter, time, space, posthumanism, more-than-human, childhood

Biography

Dr. Jayne Osgood is Professor of Childhood Studies at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University. Her work addresses issues of worldly justice through critical engagement with policy, curricular frameworks, and pedagogical approaches in Early Childhood Education & Care. She is committed to extending understandings of the workforce, families, gender and sexualities, ‘child’, and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts through creative, affective methodologies. She has published extensively within the post- modernist paradigm with over 100 publications in the form of books, chapters and journal papers, her most recent books include Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Research Observation (2023); Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods (2019); and Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art (2019). She has served on the editorial boards of various journals and is a long-standing board member at Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. She is currently editor for the journals: Gender & Education and Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology. She is also Book Series Editor for both Bloomsbury (Feminist Thought in Childhood Research; and Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood) and Springer (Keythinkers in Education).