Exploring possibilities for gender to become otherwise: what do child-snail relations make possible?

Through a series of tentacular provocations this chapter contemplates how gender might be reimagined from child-snail relationalities. Further, it invites attunement to how else gender coalesces through a young child’s non-verbal, not-quite-literate, bodily encounters with the everyday. Whilst dominant ideas about how children are and become in the world tend to be framed by linear, anthropocentric logic characterised by certainty and knowability, how might odd-kin relationalities (Haraway, 2016) complicate such logic and open possibilities for gender to e/merge in surprising ways? Tracing the slime trails of a four-year-old child’s encounters with snails, this chapter wonders whether making-odd-kin might hold the potential to dwell upon often unnoticed and unappreciated capacities for deep immersion in now-time, and with that a persistent refusal to be contained and bound by normative ideas about what it is to be(come) gendered. Making odd-kin refuses the limits, codifications and meanings about gender and childhood that are imposed by adults on the developing child bodymind. Ultimately, with the help of Haraway’s SF praxis, this chapter explores the capacious possibilities inherent in being open to un/re-learning how to be in the world – always in relation.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Gender Un/Bound
Traversing Educational Possibilities on December 11, 2024, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781032713656
It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.