This book explores the contexts for gender identity development in early childhood education. It outlines a research study that examined how early childhood educators’ views on children’s gender identity influence their practice in the Australian early childhood education sector. It utilises feminist post-structuralism, queer theory and performativity as theoretical approaches underpinning the research, and feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis and thematic analysis as methods of analysis. It captures the voices of educators and developers of curriculum documents to explore how gender expansive environments can be created when this is positioned as contentious, socially and politically. It identifies discourses that enable and constrain the building of pro-diversity spaces and contexts in early childhood education. It considers how to disrupt gender binaries and normative notions of gender, and promote the deployment of discursive agency – all essential aspects of expansive work on gender in early childhood contexts in Australia and other countries. weiterlesen