Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods

Generative Entanglements

Jayne Osgood, Kerry H. Robinson, Jayne Osgood, Kerry H. Robinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474285797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods charts the evolving nature of feminist theory and research methods in childhood studies and the generative potential this holds for researchers, academics and educators to continue to push ideas and practices. The book traces the threads of affect and effect that feminist theories and methodologies have made over time to thinking more, and differently, about gender in childhood. In the wake of the 'new materialist turn' in feminist research, the book sought to address two pressing questions: what is especially new about feminist new materialism, and what is especially feminist about feminist new materialism. These questions are generative, troubling, unsettling and invited the contributors on an adventure that involved re-turning and reconfiguring ideas and practices about gender and childhood. Along with the editors, Jayne Osgood (UK), and Kerry H. Robinson (Australia), five key international feminist scholars, Mindy Blaise (Australia), Bronwyn Davies (Australia), Debbie Epstein (UK), Jen Lyttleton-Smith (UK), and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (Canada) collaborated on this book project. Their reflective accounts capture the contribution of their own work and that of their peers, to advancing research practices and theorisations of gender in childhood. Having all approached the study of gendered childhoods in creative and critical ways, these important feminist researchers re-engage and critically reflect on their earlier work alongside their more contemporary contributions to the field. The book is as much about the processes involved in its creation as it about the material/digital end product. The chapters work with both familiar and unfamiliar feminist methodological frameworks that bring affect, materiality and embodiment, as well as textual representations of gender and childhood, into play. The book engages with, and generates artwork, poetry, photographs as a means to grapple with how gender, childhood, family, curriculum and policy have been, and might be researched. The book captures a lively, collaborative, feminist experiment that sought to make space for fresh conceptualisations of gender in childhood. Issues addressed include: social justice and transformative methodologies in childhood research; advancing theoretical perspectives that contribute to fresh understandings of gender in young children's lives; the ways that research into gender in childhood play out in educational agendas; and the specific gender issues perceived critical to address in contemporary childhoods lived in the post-Anthropocene.

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Introduction: Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater? Traces and Generative Connections between Feminist Post-structuralism and Feminist New Materialism in Childhood Studies

Jayne Osgood and Kerry H. Robinson

But in any case, creativity is not about crafting the new through a radical break with the past. It’s a matter of dis/continuity, neither continuous nor discontinuous in the usual sense. It seems to me that it’s important to have some kind of way of thinking about change that doesn’t presume there’s more of the same or a radical break. Dis/continuity is a cutting together-apart (one move) that doesn’t deny creativity or innovation but understands its indebtedness and entanglements to the past and the future. (Barad, cited in Juelskjaer & Schwennesen, 2012: 16)

A matter of dis/continuity

In the spirit of Barad’s insistence of the indebtedness and entanglements to past and future, this collaborative feminist book project sets out to explore the ways in which feminist researchers have approached the study of children, childhood, gender and sexualities over the past thirty years or so. There is a growing body of feminist scholarship that takes up new materialist approaches, and our concern is to trace how this departs from, and is continuous with, the important post-structuralist work that so profoundly shifted debates, practices and policies around gender and sexualities in childhood.

Since the late 1980s and 1990s, post-structuralist philosophies and practices shaped approaches to childhood research in significant ways. Much of the research at that time owed a debt to the theorizations of gender offered by Judith Butler. Most notable was her conceptualization of gender as performative which highlights the significance of everyday routines, performances and interactions that shape gendered behaviours and contribute to the formation of gendered identities. Her insistence that gender is socially constructed as opposed to biologically determined or learnt; that gender is fluid and shifting and hinges upon the context in which it is performed was transformative to how gender in childhood is researched. While Butler’s work continues to shape the field of childhood studies, there has been a recent emergence of a growing body of new materialist and post-humanist approaches which invites a re-examination of how we come to understand children and childhood – which also foregrounds context, fluidity and performance but which brings materiality and affect more forcibly into the frame. While research within these traditions takes many forms, our concern is to trace how feminist researchers work with the philosophies on offer to approach the study of gender and sexuality as it plays out in childhood.

This book aims to foreground the F-word within these shifting, mutating and growing theoretical and methodological currents. We are concerned with feminist post-structuralist and feminist new materialist research and with unearthing what working within these frameworks can afford feminist researchers in their pursuit of knowledge production for more liveable worlds (Haraway, 2015) where children are working through ideas and embodied encounters with gender and sexuality. Feminist scholarship is concerned with everyday life and ordinary experiences and is underpinned by political motivations to transform inequalities and injustices through critique and reconfiguration. This feminist thread courses through all the work of each contributor to this book.

Generative feminism(s): Working across/within/through borders

For decades, feminist research has made a crucially important contribution to developing diverse and collaborative ways to understand gender, feminism(s), sexual identities, education and embodied experiences. Attending to social inequities through an intersectional lens, feminist research has exposed how power operates in childhood contexts, taking the personal as political into the heart of research investigations to radically shift how children are conceptualized. By focusing on the role of language in the constitution of social reality, and by demonstrating that discursive practices constitute the social position of women and girls, post-structuralist feminists engaged in important deconstructive work to identify the concepts that define and denigrate. Linguistic and discursive projects of deconstruction have been productive to aid complex analyses of the interconnection between knowledge, power, subjectivity and language (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008). Crucially, feminist post-structuralist scholarship opened up critical ways to understand how gender intersects with social class, race, sexuality and so on to position women and girls within cultural systems of difference that cast them as subordinate, inferior or in some sense other. However, while many social constructionist theories grant the existence of material reality, it is often viewed separately to language, discourse and culture. This presumed separateness has meant that the textual, linguistic and discursive have remained the focus of research, and materiality, the body and nature are viewed as products of discourse. The material turn in feminist research moves away from this privileging of textual representation, systems of thought and discourses and instead emphasizes social production rather than social construction. Or as Haraway states, we must engage in practices of materialized refiguration (1994: 61–62):

Textual re-reading is never enough, even if one defines the text as the world. Reading however active, is not a powerful enough trope … the trick is to make metaphor and materiality implode in culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production … engaging in the always messy projects of description, narration, invention, inhabiting, conversing, exchanging and building. The point is to get at how worlds are made and unmade, in order to participate in the processes … The point is not just to read the webs of knowledge production; the point is to reconfigure what counts as knowledge in the interests of reconstituting the generative forces of embodiment.

Emergence of the ‘new’

The new materialist/affective turn in feminist research has produced a wider range of methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches with which to theorize and research gender. However, the ‘newness’ of these exciting developments owes an enormous debt to generations of feminist scholars; the aim of this book is to recognize and celebrate the rich feminist landscape. Fox and Alldred (2017: 2) note the lineage from which new materialism emerged:

New materialism has been informed by post-structuralist, feminist, post-colonialist and queer theories, which rejected structuralist determinism as inadequate to critique patriarchy … or to supply a critical and radical stance to underpin struggles for social justice and plurality.

Furthermore, the ‘newness’ must be treated with caution and placed in context. Questions guiding the creation of this book have included ‘what is especially new about new materialism?’ and ‘what is especially feminist about feminist new materialism?’ While feminist new materialism presents innovative approaches to conceptualizing and grappling with gender issues in education, concerns such as inequalities, violence and power asymmetries have always been foundational to feminist research. We also need to caution against colonizing or appropriating or ignoring indigenous cosmologies such as traditional Maori, Inuit and Aboriginal thought that has for millennia considered the human–natural world as inextricably interwoven so that objects, places, weather patterns, seasons and so on are respected, acknowledged and encountered as material-discursive-semiotic manifestations. Engaging ethically with such worldviews can assist feminist new materialists in working from the premise that we are inseparable from the materiality of the world and our knowledge of it (Coole & Frost, 2010). As Taylor and Ivinson (2013: 666) stress:

By properly recognising that we have no birds-eye position from which to look back or down at our world, we have to take seriously our own messy, implicated, connected, embodied involvement in knowledge production.

Coole and Frost (2010) discuss three interrelated but distinctive directions in new materialist scholarship – first, an ontological reorientation that conceives of matter itself as lively or exhibiting agency; second, a consideration of biopolitical and bioethical issues concerning the status of life and the human; and third, a fresh exploration of the material details of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socio-economic structures. Across these three approaches is a shared emphasis on materialization as a complex, pluralistic and open process where humans (including the researcher) are recognized as thoroughly immersed within materialities. New materialism concerns itself with forces, energies, intensities, affect and complex (sometimes random) processes. New materialist ontologies demand a rethinking of, and renewed attention to, how matter comes to matter. This requires a radical reappraisal of what is meant by subjectivity, a reassessment of ethics and re-examination of power. Decentring the human subject opens possibilities to bring into play unfamiliar frames for reimagining justice and for exploring the wider sources, qualities and dimensions of agency.

Our biggest concern in this book is to attend to the generative, generating and generational potential available in tracing lines through feminist research (Van der tuin, 2015). One important line in feminist thought is that it is our being in the world that grants us knowledge.

Knowing, thinking, measuring and theorizing, and observing are material practices of intra-acting within and part of the world … We do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing things as they exist frozen in time like little statues positioned in the world. Rather, we learn about phenomena – about specific material configurations of the world’s becoming … the point is not merely that knowledge practices have material consequences but that practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world. (Barad, 2007: 91)

Feminist post-structuralists (e.g. Butler, 1990; Grosz, 1994) and feminist new materialists (e.g. Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2008, 2016) foreground ethics and our ethical responsibility to displace any claims to objectivity and detachment from that which we research. Seeking out these dis/continuities across time and space allows us to further contemplate what feminist research is possible of and what it does best: unsettle, intervene and insist upon demonstrable impacts for greater gender equity in educational policy, practical pedagogies and within communities. The politically motivated practices of feminist researchers are present across post-structuralist and new materialist studies; the persistence of gender as an issue and a problem in childhood contexts acts to continuously drive our investigations, experimentations and our insistence that gender in childhood must be understood differently in ways that are more ethical and recognize the shifting and specific contexts in which childhoods play out. This outrage can generate guides to action that take account of complexity:

Outrage will not and should not disappear, but a politics devoted too exclusively to moral condemnation and not enough to cultivated discernment of the web of agentic capacities can do little good … An understanding of agency as confederate thus involves the need to detach ethics from moralism and to produce guides to action appropriate to a world of vital, cross-cutting forces. (Bennett, 2010: 38)

Feminist researchers are outraged; it is outrage that motivates and drives our research – a desire to address injustice, prejudice, oppression. Ahmed’s (2017) figure of the ‘feminist killjoy’ finds expression in how we endeavour to live our lives and make a difference in the world. Naming discourses, critiquing policies and practices, and problematizing and unsettling taken-for-granted ‘truths’ are all vital tools for the feminist researcher. Furthermore, the work of Braidotti, Haraway and Barad among others presents the feminist researcher with possibilities to reconfigure what we think we see and what we think we know (about gender and sexualities in childhood). Working with the material and the affective in childhood studies generates new knowledges and new ways of viewing and being in the world.

Enacting feminist politics in research

Taking up feminist new materialism involves rupturing our previous efforts to represent and capture gendered lives as they are lived in early childhood contexts and to make space for, acknowledge, and play with that which is routinely written out and invisibilized in conventional research practices. It requires that we take seriously the seemingly unremarkable, insignificant, routine everyday matter, events and becomings within which children are entangled. The shape that research studies take and methods that are employed become reconfigured.

While much post-structuralist feminist research in childhood employs ethnographic methods – and so the material and affective are omnipresent – the emphasis nevertheless tends towards a focus on the human subject by observing, gathering data, capturing accounts and reproducing them in textual form (as observation notes, interview transcripts) that are then subjected to textual analysis to identify discourses and discursive constructions of gendered patterns and problems in early childhood. This scholarship significantly interrupts taken-for-granted truths about children, childhood innocence, developmentalism and heteronormativity and insists that children must be viewed more respectfully as agentic knowing subjects capable of navigating and generating alternative discourses. Despite this important work though, the field of early childhood in its broadest sense persistently falls back into developmentalist logic, and so the task for the feminist researcher is to consistently restate arguments that present gender as more complex, slippery, contingent than normative frameworks allow for.

The current work of feminist new materialist researchers in childhood studies (e.g. Huuki & Renold, 2015; Jones, 2013; Lyttleton-Smith, 2017) seeks to keep in play the need to re-conceptualize the child and childhood, but rather than deconstructing how children are positioned within discourse, the goal is to attend to generating different knowledges about childhood that are situated and where the researcher is active in processes of production. Foregrounding affect and materiality in the research process demands different, more embodied and intra-active methods. Methods and data take on a different form in feminist new materialist studies; they insist that the researcher is immersed, engaged and actively participating in practices that generate other ways to sense and be in the world. What counts as ‘method’ and what constitutes ‘data’ are called into question (Lather and St Pierre, 2013). The everydayness of lives lived and attention to microscopic events that unfold in un/predictable ways insist that researchers take up a more vulnerable approach (as non-expert) and embrace capacities to exercise curiosity and wonder (MacLure, 2013).

This is enacted in contemporary studies undertaken by feminist scholars, including Lenz Taguchi (2010), Taylor et al. (2012), Kind (2013), Nxumalo (2016), Gannon (2017), Lloro-Bidart (2017) and Hickey-Moody (2017), among many others. These studies attend to the significance of place, context, histories and inter-species relations through mobile and digital methodologies (e.g. video, sound, photography) and through movement methodologies (e.g. walking, dancing, crafting, performing as method). These ‘doing’ methodologies clearly mark a shift from the ethnographic practices of the feminist post-structuralist researcher which are more readily recognizable as conventional research methods that fit within a more recognizable study design with discrete and knowable stages. Working across disciplinary boundaries and embracing unconventional embodied and material practices work to produce a different sort of research process. Within this mode of enquiry (recognized as ‘post-qualitative’, see Koro-Lungberg et al., 2017), the emphasis is placed on the processes and effects of the research as it takes shape rather than a concern with a set of conclusive outputs. Manning (2016) claims that this mode of enquiry requires a reorientation in order that we can enact and be open to the concept of ‘research-creation as a mode of activity that is at its most interesting when it is constitutive of new processes. This can only happen if its potential is tapped in advance of its alignments with existing disciplinary methods and institutional structures’, and she goes on to stress that ‘new processes will likely create new forms of knowledge that may have no means of evaluation within current disciplinary models’ (p. 28).

As post-qualitative inquiry, feminist new materialism and arts-based methods are gaining ground in early childhood research; they can appear daunting precisely because the intention is to break free from the constraints (or comforts) of recognizable research approaches and disciplinary models. These ‘new’ approaches force questions about what counts as valid knowledge production (Lather, 1993). Returning briefly to Manning (2016), she claims that what emerges is ‘a call for speculative pragmatism, speculative in the sense that the process remains open to the more-than, and pragmatic in the sense that it is completely invested in its ‘something doing’’ (p. 33). It is evident that this mode of enquiry is deeply political when the feminist agenda remains in place and that it demands that feminist researchers get ‘their hands dirty’ in the thick of research processes – in the ‘something doings’. For early childhood researchers, this is not a radical departure from the form that many ethnographic studies in early childhood contexts take, where it is nearly impossible not to become entangled in the ebb and flow of daily life, routines and messy unpredictable happenings that are bodily, affective and material. But working from a feminist new materialist framework requires that we immerse ourselves more fully in the intensities, flows, rhythms, affects and forces of children’s entanglements with space, place and materiality.

Central to much early childhood research taking up the methodological and onto-epistemological challenges of working within a feminist new materialist framework is the SF philosophy put forward by Donna Haraway through her corpus of work spanning over thirty years but culminating in her most recent book Staying with the Trouble (2016) in which she stresses a need to engage in worldling practices. Worldling involves (de)contextualizing the familiar and learning to think in otherworldly ways which involve dis/continuities and tracing through the archives of feminist scholarship to ask the ‘what-if’ questions and then actively engage in world-making which involves ‘deep hanging out’ (Haraway, 2016).

Deep hanging out for feminist new materialist researchers researching with children insists upon a different starting point; rather than gathering data to answer a predefined set of questions, the goal is more open-ended and uncertain; the ultimate aim is to produce new knowledges, new ways of sensing and being in the world; and it is within processes of creative experimentation, exercising curiosity and resisting habitual ways of seeking out what is already known, that gender (as processes of becoming in micro-moments) can be reimagined. These examples also demonstrate how these researchers, through ‘doing’ methodologies, keep in place the political motivations underpinning their work to pursue issues of gender, class, race and disability. This is important to underscore since one of the greatest concerns for sceptics and those new to feminist new materialism is that post-humanist approaches erase humanist concerns. However, the philosophies offered by Ahmed, Barad, Braidotti and Haraway, alongside these post-qualitative examples, demonstrate that, in fact, there is heightened awareness and attention to these issues in feminist new materialist modes of enquiry. New feminist materialism invites an engagement with the (extra)ordinary that is to be found in the routine everyday events in early childhood, the everyday that can be explored through an engagement with processes of becoming that recognizes the productive capacity of the minor gesture (Manning, 2016) to provide the means to view children and their entangled place more generatively. This is what Ahmed (2006) conceptualizes as orientations:

The starting point for orientation is the point from which the world unfolds: the ‘here’ of the body and the ‘where’ of its dwelling. Orientations, then are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places … Bodies may become orientated in this responsiveness to the world around them … In turn, given the histories of such responses, which accumulate as impressions of the skin, bodies do not dwell in spaces that are exterior but rather are shaped by their dwellings and take shape by dwelling.

Navigating ways through this book

Our hope is that this book might be engaged with diffractively; we invite readers to delve in and read chapters through each other or in isolation, in sequence or more haphazardly. The project we have set ourselves is transversal, not a linear chronology of where we once were as feminist researchers to where we are now. The aim is to illuminate the threads, connections, sticky knots and productive possibilities that come about from a project of this nature. We present our messy collaboration as a means to provoke thought and inspire research practices in early childhood that benefit from layering and weaving femin...