ABSTRACT
This chapter reports some observations made of the social interactions of girls and boys, aged 3 to 5 years, in play situations in a preschool1 classroom of a childcare centre. It provides an alternate framework for early childhood educators to become aware of how preschool children construct their gendered social organisations. As girls and boys organise and build their social worlds of play through their talk-in-interaction, they are building their social orders. In this chapter, an analysis of one episode of children’s play has, as its focus, the methods that some girls and boys use in their talk and activity to make sense of their everyday interactions. The analysis of play shows the children’s real life work of constructing and maintaining gendered social orders in their lived everyday worlds. A close reading of the transcript of an episode illustrates how two girls turn the boys’ masculine practices of ritualised threats into a performance. By so doing, they show that while they know the masculine discourse, and can perform it themselves, they do not actually ‘own’ it in the way that the boys do. In this way, gender is established not as a social identity but as a dynamic practice that is ongoing, built by relational encounters and shaped by the collective performances of the participants.
