Becoming gendered bodies: a posthuman analysis of how gender is produced in an early childhood classroom

In this thesis I explore how gender features in the experiences of nursery age children in South Wales, using a new feminist materialist theoretical framework to inform an analysis that moves away from the binary separation of the social and material spheres. Drawing on a year of ethnographic data produced through participant observation in a state school nursery located in a deprived suburban area, I examine small ‘moments of emergence’ where gender is produced within the spaces and relationships of the nursery. I take a posthumanist stance to these emergences, where I do not locate the children themselves as agential producers of gender, but instead trace how human and non-human bodies and discourses work through space and time to delineate subjects and objects in gendering ways. Through doing so I shift focus from a purely social understanding of how gender roles are transferred to young children and instead encourage a holistic view of how environments, matter, and temporality combine with discourse through multiple and complex pathways to create continuous and flexible (re)iterations of gender emergence. I argue that it is only when we appreciate the complexity of these emergences that we can seek to positively impact children’s gender experiences in effective ways