(Re)Storying Dolls and Cars: Gender and Care with Young Children
Date
2014-12-03
Authors
Hodgins, B. Denise
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Abstract
Feminist theorising has been instrumental in efforts to challenge gender hierarchies and conceptualize care as an ethic of relationality and interdependence, and has influenced visions of pedagogy as a relational, ethical and political endeavour. While these pedagogies importantly challenge simplified, uncontextualized, apolitical notions of both gender and care, they do not necessarily attend to the increasing complexity of children’s heterogeneous commonworlds.
Following a theoretical and methodological framework aligned with material feminism and post qualitative research, in particular thinking with feminist scholars Barad and Haraway, this research questions what an engagement with human-and non-human relationality might do to complicate conversations about gender and care. Employing pedagogical narrations through a post-qualitative lens, this inquiry explores how children, educators and things become implicated in gendered caring practices. A diffractive analysis is put to work wherein gender and care are analyzed with/in several child-doll and child-car encounters, and are diffractively read through other doll and car stories near and far from the classroom. This analysis illuminates the political and ethical embeddedness of early childhood pedagogies, and the understanding that gendering and caring emerge with/in a complex web of many relations. Material feminism loosens ties that bind simplified constructions of gender as explanations for care and vice versa, and instead puts forward that gender and care per formatively emerge through intra-action. As such pedagogical and research practices need to pay careful attention to that which is always already on the verge of becoming.
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Keywords
gender, care, material feminism, early childhood education, pedagogical narrations, post-qualitative research, dolls, toy cars