How gender comes to matter: tracing matter, space, place, time and affect in early childhood research

This chapter re-turns to encounters in early childhood contexts as they are presented by a range of feminist new materialist scholars over the past decade. This body of work underscores the imperative to research gender and sexualities in ways that attend to the more-than-human. Our tracing illustrates that this emergent field of scholarship presents new and generative possibilities for opening out ideas and practices concerning how gender comes to matter in early childhood. Gender is understood expansively so that the organisation of space, the agency of matter, the significance of atmospheric forces that create possibilities to re-imagine gender and sexualities become central to investigation. Dwelling upon the feltness of encounters in early childhood contexts involves paying close attention to forces agitated from emerging, vanishing and transforming affective ecologies. Our objective in this chapter then, is to re-attune to spatiality, flows, intensities, and affective stutters; to zoom in and out to illuminate multiple and contradictory gendered forces at play, and to make visible what that might mean for research and practice. While some hegemonic gender formations continue to be privileged, we explore how they are at once queered by other affective currents that present ways of becoming gendered otherwise.