Abstract
The present article focuses on how ‘sexual orientation’ is represented and produced in a Swedish preschool policy document regarding discrimination and equal treatment. ‘Poststuctural policy analysis’ is employed, in line with Foucault) and Bacchi. The results show that ‘sexual orientation’ is represented as a matter for families, but for parents rather than children. In the plans for equal treatment, visualizing different families stands out as the goal of working preventively against discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation’ in preschool, and the active measures planned for are reading books and spontaneous conversations. The article argues that the discrimination perspective represented in the documents, together with discourses on childhood innocence, establish certain conditions for how ‘sexual orientation’ is produced in preschool.
Highlights
Aside from being a central part of children’s life, the preschool setting is an interesting context for negotiations about discourses, norms and values concerning childhood
This has a great impact in giving this issue legitimation in the context of Swedish preschools, but the interest of the present article is how this translates into local policy and how sexual orientation is represented when goals and active measures are formulated by teachers and headmasters
The following example from one preschools ‘plans for equal treatment’ shows how families is highlighted in the description on how to work preventively against discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation’: Together with the children, the pedagogues have read and borrowed literature that shows on different family structures
Summary
Aside from being a central part of children’s life, the preschool setting is an interesting context for negotiations about discourses, norms and values concerning childhood. For more than ten years preschools are obligated by anti-discrimination law and the curriculum to work against discrimination based on sexual orientation This has a great impact in giving this issue legitimation in the context of Swedish preschools, but the interest of the present article is how this translates into local policy and how sexual orientation is represented when goals and active measures are formulated by teachers and headmasters. This body of research finds that sexuality and sexual diversity is being silenced and excluded and, by this heteronormativity, is reproduced in the ECE setting Given that these questions still need to be addressed in different ways, the present article focus on the presence of ‘sexual orientation’. How does Swedish preschool deal with ‘sexual orientation’ in the policy document? In which ways, and under what conditions, is ‘sexual orientation’ in the preschool setting represented and produced?
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