Reconfiguring the ‘Male Montessorian’: the mattering of gender through pink towering practices

Abstract

This paper attempts to open out investigations in ECEC by working beyond anthropocentric accounts of gender. Drawing upon feminist new materialist philosophies we ask whether it might be possible to reconfigure ideas about gender that recognise it as produced through everyday processes and material-affective entanglements. In order to do this, we work with Montessori materials, spaces and practices to grapple with the ways that gender is produced through human-material-semiotic encounters. By focusing on familiar Montessori objects, we follow diffractive lines of enquiry to extend investigations and generate new knowledge about gender in ECEC. This shift in focus allows other accounts about gender to find expression. We argue gender can be encountered as more than an exclusively human matter; and we go on to debate what that might potentiate (i.e. that if gender is fleeting, shifting, and produced within micro-moments there is freedom to break free from narrow framings that fix people, such as ‘the Male Montessorian’, in unhelpful ways). An approach that foregrounds affect and materiality makes a hopeful, generative and expansive contribution to the field.Abbreviation: ECEC, Early Childhood Education and Care

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