”I’m not a boy – I am a girl!” : a study of how educators describe gender norms, gender norm critical work and children who oppose gender norms

The subject of this study is gender norms in the preschool and children who oppose those norms. The aim is to investigate how the discourses are linked with the way in which preschool teachers and teaching assistants talk about children’s gender identity. This study is founded in feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, which was a basis for the interpretation of the results. My research questions are: • How do educators express themselves concerning gender norms? • What do educators need to work with a gender critical agenda? • How do the educators describe their work concerning gender, gender norms and children who oppose those norms? • For educators who have experience with children who do not identify with the gender they was given at birth, how do educators describe their own treatment of said children, and how would they describe the treatment from the other members of the teaching team? The study consists of qualitative interviews with five educators who were asked questions relevant to: norms, gender, gender criticism and how they work with those topics. I found both positive and negative aspects of gender work in preschool. Generally norms are seen as something you have to adapt to. Sometimes there are collisions between the different approaches from younger and older educators gender work, and sometimes this collision takes place between educators and parents. I found that the educators I interviewed generally want to question the heteronorm, only they sometimes dont realise how affected they are by it themselves.