ABSTRACT
There is a recurrent discourse that polices men’s entrance to and work within the field of early education. In a study of men who did choose to cross this gender-based teaching border (King, 1997), I found that that male classroom teachers in grades K to 3 did so with the realization that their teaching, their talk, their very persons would be subjected to constant surveillance. Their cause for the monitoring (and self-monitoring that it engendered) was the entropy that was bound up in the imagined sexual potential of these male teachers. After all, in the cultural imagination, early education is often considered or hoped to be an asexual content of women’s care work. What could a man want? This chapter will argue that the cohesive link in the suspicion surrounding men’s teaching is the underlying trope of desire, desire that can be revealed in all teaching.
