ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a complicated gender and care conversation is needed to open possibilities for understanding and facilitating diverse practices of caring for children. Early childhood pedagogies have been influenced by feminist critiques of dominant biological and social theories of gender that reduce gender to universal differences: male/female, masculine/feminine, men/women, boys/girls. Challenges to conceptualizations of gender as an essential, fixed, internally produced trait, and disruptions to the notion that gender develops naturally and inevitably, have greatly complicated the gender care conversation. Feminist theorizing has challenged gender hierarchies and conceptualized care as an ethic of relationality and interdependence. Influencing visions of pedagogy as a relational, ethical, and political endeavour, feminist theorizing has also challenged gender as the only marker of difference. It recognizes gender as entangled with histories, conceptualizations, and practices related to colonization, racialization, sexuality, and socioeconomic status. This book’s theoretical positioning leans heavily on this theorizing and adds a feminist materialism that extends accounts/strategies grounded in humanist ontologies and epistemologies. Gender and care are understood as entanglements with materialdiscursive technologies, rather than belonging to, located within, and emerging from an individual autonomous subject.
