Introduction: routes, tools and coalitions for un/binding gender

This book started off as a mixed matterphor (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021), which feels fitting, given the entangled spaces, places, times, and (subject) matter that this collection traverses. The original call for chapters advertised a prospective book that we first imagined would be called Un/boxing Gender – what a brilliant title! This book could open conversations about tick boxes (male/female; heterosexual/gay; cis/trans; “gender diverse”) and gender disparities and toy boxes and single-sex schools and being coerced into labels and uniforms and behaviours and expectations, and, and, and. We could talk about how those in education are (not) resisting these constraints, refusing categories, expanding: more-than-binary, non-linear, multiplicitous, more-than-human, in/determinate. How hasn’t anyone thought of such a title? Oh wait, they had. Renold and Timperley’s (2023) and Renold et al.’s (2024) brilliant Unboxing project had passed across And’s screen just a few months earlier and had clearly placed a seed in their mind. Though Jayne and Susanne had played in EJ’s methodological makerspaces at the 2019 Gender and Education conference, “unboxing” had not registered in their memories.