Our members, Prof. Deevia Bhana (University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) and Dr. Yuwei Xu (University of Nottingham, U.K.), as well as their co-editor Prof. Vina Adriany (Universitas Pendidikan, Indonesia), talk about their edited collection, Gendered and Sexual Norms in Global South Early Childhood Education: Understanding Normative Discourses in Post-Colonial Contexts (Routledge, 2023).
The book examines the complex intersection of gender, sexuality, and early childhood education against the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial narratives. The book takes us through early childhood educational environments in Brazil, China, Pakistan, South Africa, and Vietnam.
In each of the country contexts we are provided with rich insight into the manifestations of conventional notions of gender and sexuality and its rooting in the historical colonial condition, cultural norms, and power dynamics. Within the framework of the postcolonial condition, the chapters embark on a journey to uncover heterosexual dominance, male authority, the imprint of religion, and conservative politics, and the evolving social and cultural landscapes that shape the realm of early childhood education.
The book explores how these multifaceted elements collaborate to perpetuate or contest gendered and sexual norms. As the book unfolds, readers are invited to explore a multidimensional landscape where historical conditions reverberate with contemporary challenges. From each of the country contexts the complex tapestry of gender, sexuality, and early childhood education are unravelled encouraging readers to critically engage with prevailing norms.
The book is motivated by the potential to disrupt and challenge these established gender and sexuality norms within early childhood education. By doing so, the book seeks to underscore their persistent presence and emphasizes the urgency to challenge and reshape understandings of gender and sexuality within the postcolonial milieu.
The impetus behind this book emerges from the acknowledgment of the limited studies situating gender and sexuality within Global South early childhood education contexts, a field that remains in its early stages of development. As co-editors, our shared goal was to rectify the noticeable absence of gender and sexuality in these settings.
We, as an editorial team, originate from distinct Global South contexts, each with our own histories and experiences of colonialism. The lead editor, Deevia Bhana, from South Africa has been at the forefront of advancing childhood studies, foregrounding the significance of gender and sexuality in the realm of young lives.
Yuwei Xu, as the second editor has a background that involves being raised in China and later relocating to the UK while maintaining research engagements within Chinese settings, thereby infusing a transnational dimension to the exploration of gender and early childhood education.
Vina Adriany, the third editor, originating from Indonesia, and currently works within the juncture of gender, sexuality, religion, and cultural norms in early childhood. Our personal trajectories in the Global South and academic interests in gender and sexuality drew us together as we strive to contribute to advancing scholarship in this domain.
Although our initial intention encompassed a broader spectrum of countries within the Global South, we encountered the stark reality of scarce or absent research in these contexts. The marginalisation of research in the field reaffirms our recognition of the critical necessity to nurture and bolster research across diverse Global South landscapes. This book stands as a tangible stride in pursuit of that very objective.
This book discusses how gender and sexuality manifest in early childhood education (ECE) settings in Brazil, China, Pakistan, South Africa, and Vietnam. Collectively, we show how teachers (and children) mainly emphasise gender and sexual norms that reify binaries that pivot around the heterosexual compulsion, masculine prowess, and the regulation of alternate forms of sexualities. In the different countries, we explore how the heterosexual imperative is invoked, producing ambiguity, plasticity, and a static account of gender identities. We focus on the ways in which gender, culture, religion, masculinity, sport, and conservative political censorship assemble together to facilitate the reproduction of gendered and sexual norms, while also showing changing patterns that provide possibilities for new ways of thinking, being, and becoming in ECE. The intention of this book is not simply to show how gender, sexuality, and ECE converge in Global South contexts, but also to reflect on how these convergences are the effects of the postcolonial condition, which shapes the production of identity.
Situated in the context of colonial and postcolonial discourses, the book aims to examine how dominant constructions of gender and sexuality are embedded within history, change, and socio-cultural constructions of identity. A key question underpinning this book is, “How, in the context of postcoloniality, does gender and sexuality manifest in ECE, and how is this manifestation underlined by sociocultural norms and values?” In doing so, the chapters in this book explore the consistency and diversity in the experience of heterosexual domination, male power, the effects of religion and conservative politics, and the shifts and changes within social and cultural contexts. The book addresses how dominant gender and sexual norms are configured within local settings, how these experiences relate to the postcolonial experience, and what this means for changing and challenging gender ideologies within an overall framing where the demand for addressing gender inequalities early has long been established (Alloway, 1995; Blaise, 2005; Davies, 2003; MacNaughton, 2000). Our aim in the book is to show how gender and sexuality in the ECE sector in Global South contexts are inextricably entangled with legacies of colonisation and the surrounding social and cultural contexts, informing our responsibility in addressing inequalities and injustice.
In many Global South ECE settings, such as those in the researched countries, normative understandings of gender and sexuality are entangled with colonial legacies based on gender polarities and heteronormativity (Adriany, 2019; Bhana, 2016b; Mayeza, 2017). ECE is embedded in material and symbolic structures of power that are historically produced, and it interacts with contemporary politics and socioeconomic conditions to create and shape subjectivities in crucial ways. The intersection of race and class, with the histories of colonialism and contemporary patterns of socioeconomic inequalities, has effects for gender and sexual norms (Mayeza, 2017). How ECE encounters and comprehends these entangled norms, enmeshed in the legacies of colonisation, is a matter of major consequence. As emerging research in the Global South suggests, understandings of gender and sexuality in ECE remain mired in gender stereotypes and local practices that reflect the normalisation of heterosexuality and the reinforcement of gender norms (Adriany, 2019; Bhana, 2016a; Xu et al., 2022). In this book, we have come together, as scholars emerging from Global South contexts, to examine the everyday practices, meanings, memories, and experiences within ECE settings to understand how gender and sexuality are configured within these constellations of power.
A major task in this book is to destabilise the relative silence around gender and sexuality in Global South ECE contexts. There is now a long-established tradition of working with ECE sectors in the Global North (Brody et al., 2021; R. Chapman, 2022; Davies et al., 2021; Warin, 2023); however, this steady flow of research, with few exceptions (Adriany, 2019; Adriany et al., 2021; Bhana, 2016a, 2016b; Bhana & Mayeza, 2019; Moosa & Bhana, 2022; Xu, 2020a, 2020b), has not been complemented by scholarship in Global South contexts. The existing scholarship has drawn attention to the need to address, respond to, and engage with the gendered and sexual realties in ECE (Blaise, 2005; MacNaughton, 2000; Osgood & Robinson, 2017; Puutio et al., 2022; Robinson, 2012; Tobin, 1997). In this book, our purpose is to begin to respond to the numerous possibilities for disrupting gender and sexuality in Global South ECE contexts, unsettling the silences and provoking new ways of thinking and being in ECE. Specifically, we discuss how the ECE sector understands, contests, negotiates, and challenges dominant social norms that often preclude putting gender and sexuality on the ECE agenda. The aim of each of the chapters is to examine everyday gender and sexual norms and social interactions, shaped by histories of colonisation and the dynamics of power in ECE settings. The main argument is that gender and heterosexual norms, (re)produced through histories of colonial encounters, create and disable capacities for addressing inequalities in ECE sectors.