Queerying' gender : heteronormativity in early childhood education

This paper explores heteronormativity and argues for the 'queerying' of gender in early childhood education. The author argues, utilising Butler's theory of performativity and heterosexual matrix, that the construction of gender in young children's lives requires an analysis of the normalising practices in which gendered identities are simultaneously heterosexualised. It is upheld that the dominant discourse of childhood in conjunction with developmentalist theory render sexuality as irrelevant to children's lives, thus resulting in a radical silencing and dismissal of how children become sexualised subjects. Thus these discourses operate to render invisible the process of heteronormativity operating in children's lives, including in early childhood educational contexts. It is argued that, if the intimate relationship between gender and sexuality is not incorporated into understandings of constructions of gendered identities, we will continue to get only a partial perspective of what is happening in this process.