Gender un/bound: traversing educational possibilities

This book is intrigued by the dis/continuities between gender, education, and the various ways in which they are un/bound together-apart. Queer theory and similar approaches to gender and gender norms have tended to focus on the ways in which norms might be disrupted to trouble the ways in which these performativities constrain the possibilities for becoming (cf. Butler, 1990). To produce a collection focused on the possibilities for unbinding people from gendered expectations in and around educational spaces would fit this remit, yet it is only a fragment of the conversation. Instead, we are more interested in accounting for the ways gender is reconstituted in and through education: how learners make leaps and bounds in their understandings of gender; the boundary making practices that redefine the limits of gender; potential destinations gender is bound for (whether or not they are ever reached); senses of gendered obligation; the various matters that are tied into genderings; the way restraint might be liberating; or perhaps the way gender is bound up like a beautiful book, as an elaborate praxis of care, produced bespoke for its readers. All of these potential meanings and more! Rather than producing a false binary between constraint and sovereignty, we are curious about how our contributors navigate what emerges from the relations that produce the boundaries of gender’s contingent im/possibility in education.