Celebrating pioneering and contemporary feminist approaches to studying gender in early childhood

This chapter charts feminist research in early childhood and the generative potential it offers to continually revisit childhood and gender—and the important ways in which this has shifted over time. This review celebrates the significant contributions feminist scholars have made to the field; and demonstrates the potentialities within contemporary approaches such as new materialism and posthumanism to respond to postfeminist claims that gender is no longer an issue. Our intention is to identify the centrality of feminism to the field of early childhood studies and the continued relevance of gender to all early childhood debates. The chapter addresses the following issues: the influence of feminist theory to conceptualizations of the child/childhood; the relationship of feminist theory to post-structuralism and to queer theory in relation to understandings of childhood, gender, and sexuality; equitable and transformative pedagogies in early childhood education; advances in theoretical perspectives that contribute to contemporary understandings of gender in the lives of young children, including the tensions that can exist around some feminist perspectives and gender diverse and trans children; the perceived relevance of gender issues in early childhood policy and curricular frameworks; and identifying the current gender issues pertinent to early childhood education and to young children’s lives.