Duct-taped X: gender and the ‘ethically enabling conditions’ of creative-activism on pre-teen peer cultures

Abstract

ABSTRACT With this paper, we participate in the body of work seeking to develop ethically sustainable practices for addressing gender, sexuality and power in pre-teen peer cultures in an inclusive, non-normative and transformative manner. To do so, we draw on feminist new materialist and posthuman scholarship and a series of events from our school-based creative workshops with 10–12-year-old children. First, by analysing the gendered flows of forces of the workshop, we demonstrate how educational and research interventions on gender are entangled and fraught with heteronormative flows of force that circulate in peer cultures. Second, we argue that composing conditions for gender to be explored and addressed cannot be based on assumptions about how gender should matter when working with children but on how it does matter in the materially situated, affective and historically contingent practices of engagement. To achieve that aim, the paper proposes to ‘work in-tensionally’ to construct ‘ethically enabling conditions’ for school-based research and education on pre-teen gender and sexual cultures.