Dr Ampersand (And) Pasley

Responding to the un/doing of intentions to smoothly enact creative cartographic intra-views and art projects with four trans secondary students (aged 16-17years old), this chapter employs Halberstam’s (2011) queer art of failure to explore the capaciousness of stuttering methodologies. While transnormativities and geographical limitations undermined the possibility of focus groups,one-on-one intra-views and a spontaneous walking methodology emerged in their place. Art projects that remained ideations highlighted how trans students were likewise never complete but always whole. The participant who ‘ghosted’ underscored the limits of researcher agencyand demonstrated how participation is a hauntological phenomenon. These stutterings illustrate how neither‘failure’ nor ‘success’ is knowable in advance of relations (Barad, 2007), destabilising this binary. The trans art of failure extends artistic politics that offers “the possibilities of new, more different sensations than those we know” (Grosz, 2008, p. 79) through hauntology (Derrida, 1994; Barad, 2012) and immanence (Manning, 2016). 

This entry takes up Barad’s (2007) posthuman conceptualization of response-ability to trace (trans)gender im/possibilities in early childhood education and care (ECEC). To begin, the article foregrounds why (trans)gender is relevant to ECEC by engaging with (and troubling) gender identity development, engaging with the prevalence of transgender young people, and offering a more expansive sense of gender im/possibilities that exist beyond cis/trans binaries. Thereafter, what it means to be response-able to these dynamics is outlined as a means of defining an agential realist ethics. Subsequently, response-abilities to gendering im/possibilities in ECEC are exemplified through more-than-human entanglements, pronouns and consent education, and the irresolvability of gender in/justices.

Intercultural education and language teaching theories, premised on Western humanism (see Wynter, 2003), understand learners and educators as agents that bring their cultures to the classroom, which are thereafter perpetually renegotiated, (re)forming the classroom (e.g., Bowe, Martin, & Manns, 2014; Byram, 2015; Chen, 2014; Lantz-Deaton, & Golubeva, 2020; Lustig & Koester, 2010; Ting-Toomey, & Chung, 2012). Generally, these works also consider that intercultural competence entails the capacity to negotiate those relationships in ways that uphold the integrity of all members of the dynamic. However, these dynamics treat learners as distinct autonomous individuals who represent their ‘cultures’ in the classroom, signified in the ‘inter’ of interculturality. The cultures or discourses that constitute them are assumed to exist outside of these dynamics.

Intercultural theorists are typically aware of the contested definitions of culture and often prepared to provide their own epistemological position (e.g., Moon, 2023), but Blaser (2009) contests that this demand belies a coloniality that traps these debates in Modern/colonial ontological assumptions. This ties back to Cartesian dichotomisations of Nature and Culture, which are employed to position non-modern people as inferior by virtue of not making such distinctions. Mitchell (cited in Blaser, 2009) contends that this allows Modernists to reify themselves by positioning non-modernists as the constitutive Other. That is, because they do not obey the logic of Modernity, their ways of knowing and being are conceived as mere superstition (de la Cadena, 2010). Interculturality risks becoming complicit in this non-innocent education (Coloma, 2013), so this entry offers a range of alternate strategies for engaging with others that denaturalise Culture.

Intercultural theories highlight the importance of developing a deep understanding of what makes an individual who they are, including values, beliefs, and attitudes; the legible humanistic characteristics that render them recognisably human(ist) (Wynter, 2003). It also asserts that it is necessary to reflect on where these aspects originate, in terms of socio-political context and communities that individuals are part of, which informs intercultural dynamics. However, this approach to intercultural development neglects that not everyone is able to critically engage with what has made them who they are as historical injustices have fostered separations that mean that knowledge of one’s histories is often inaccessible, producing problematic exclusions. A substantive source of these historical injustices is the Modern/colonial project, which was designed to privilege hegemonic Western narratives and justify the colonisation of much of the world (Quijano, 2000). However, colonisation’s effects were not uniform, affecting different groups in different ways. Of particular importance to this entry, one of these outcomes was and remains unknowability, due to forced assimilation, historical shame, or lack of socio-political safety. Up-rootedness and dis/placement speak to the way survivors of colonization are, at times, excluded from this conversation because the narratives of decolonization do not have the capacity to account for those whose roots were displaced (Ramirez & Pasley, 2023).

Intercultural theories founded in Western humanisms (Wynter, 2003) assume that every individual is a compound of different elements, including culture, language, experience, beliefs, values, traditions, etc., which may be shared by others who belong to their same communities, but are unique to one individual, providing food for thought about commonality, and difference. These assumptions are predicated on positivist notions that a singular reality is assumed to exist, ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered (de la Cadena, 2010), coupled with the Cartesian metaphysical premise that we cannot know reality outright, but measure it via epistemological apparatuses (i.e., mechanisms of knowledge production), such as scientific method or constructivism, known as representationalisms, which underpin Western humanism (St Pierre, 2016; Jackson, 2020). Subsequently, ‘culture’ is understood as the lens that shapes our impression of the world, influences our identity, and determines how we interact with/in the world. For example, some intercultural theories used in intercultural education emphasise that ‘time’ (as part of non-verbal communication) is important when learning about communicative interactions because it describes the ways cultures understand and value time, shaping how they communicate and interact. However, while these ‘humanist’ intercultural theories appreciate multiple cultural understandings of time, these are read as interpretations of an objective physical reality (see for example, Hall, 1959; Hofstede, 1991; Lantz-Deaton & Golubeva, 2020). That is, interculturality regards epistemology as multiple, yet ontology is treated as singular and incontrovertible.

This chapter affords educators the opportunity to unpack how they relate to the various ways of knowing and doing gender that ongoing feminist approaches have offered in response to the patriarchal orders that were propagated by modern/colonial systems and subsequent colonialities of gender. While each approach has its limitations, a commitment to gender justice is a good place to query how we might do better by each other. Importantly, the acknowledgement that justice is only ever partial and that injustice can never be resolved once and for all provides some perspective on why these movements continue to evolve and perhaps offers some grace for the limitations of those approaches that were doing their best under the circumstances. In line with Barad, we illustrate that theoretical developments do not negate what preceded them but give rise to new questions that might be asked. Indeed, tracing the histories that have made developments possible is integral to understanding how we might best respond to current circumstances. Our hope is that you never stop, that this text helps you continue your journey and perhaps helps you find allies along the way.

This chapter begins by recognising gender’s coloniality (Lugones, 2007); an ongoing inheritance that marks the im/possibilities of gendered knowing in being. Simultaneously, an agential realist understanding of time as being (Barad, 2018) comprehends present configurations as co-constituted by pasts that (never) were and gendered futures that might (never) be. Gender im/possibility models (Pasley, 2022; cf. Laverne Cox, 2015) become the gifts we leave behind, affecting different response-abilities for those who inherit our worlds. And yet, conventional, linear renderings of gendered inheritance produce queer elders as un/recognisable to the more capacious worlds they helped build, less bound by cisnormativities, raising questions about how we might better co-exist and help each other tend to the spectres that haunt our shared spacetime/genderings. This is an onto-epistemic matter because an agential realist ethics of response-ability demands that we trace the marks of in/justice that constitute gendered im/possibilities (Barad, 2007); a process that requires the un/learning of gender together-apart. Subsequently, the entry draws on Barad’s (2014) dis/continuity to engage with the ways in which intergenerational in/justice can never be resolved once and for all, then diffracts dis/continuity with the notion of gift giving, as both an opportunity to refuse and a shared inheritance. This affords a reconceptualization of what it might mean to practice intra-generational response-ability, recognising the potential of ongoing reciprocal un/learning and offering a more agentic sense of gender’s ongoing co-constitution.

This book started off as a mixed matterphor (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021), which feels fitting, given the entangled spaces, places, times, and (subject) matter that this collection traverses. The original call for chapters advertised a prospective book that we first imagined would be called Un/boxing Gender – what a brilliant title! This book could open conversations about tick boxes (male/female; heterosexual/gay; cis/trans; “gender diverse”) and gender disparities and toy boxes and single-sex schools and being coerced into labels and uniforms and behaviours and expectations, and, and, and. We could talk about how those in education are (not) resisting these constraints, refusing categories, expanding: more-than-binary, non-linear, multiplicitous, more-than-human, in/determinate. How hasn’t anyone thought of such a title? Oh wait, they had. Renold and Timperley’s (2023) and Renold et al.’s (2024) brilliant Unboxing project had passed across And’s screen just a few months earlier and had clearly placed a seed in their mind. Though Jayne and Susanne had played in EJ’s methodological makerspaces at the 2019 Gender and Education conference, “unboxing” had not registered in their memories.

This chapter wrestles with the tensions between posthuman thought and the colonialities of knowledge that maintain extractivist relationships with Indigenous onto-epistemologies. Drawing on Māori, Quechua and Filipinx worlds, the authors tease out various problematic posthuman tendencies, including requiring a disavowal of non-Western worlds to enter Politics, the violence of ‘humanising’ education, and the fungibility of those who exceed the colonialities of being. Subsequently, we query what would be necessary for posthumanism to foster education that can un/settle humanism, resist recolonisation and uphold plural worlds. In each instance, we find that the wilful ignorance that sustains posthumanism’s sense of exceptionalism and nuance is what leads it to reproduce the humanist hegemonies that it seeks to undo. For posthumanism to achieve what it sets out to do, we argue that it needs to enact justice for more-than-Western ways of knowing and/in being by ceasing to undermine the capacity for Other worlds to exist, acknowledging their legitimacy without appropriating their insight, and honouring their legacy, recognising that ‘there is no thought not yet thought’.

This entry begins by problematizing sexuality education, accounting for the ways in which it has tended to constrain trans students’ existences. To understand these dynamics, it is necessary to trace the histories that have produced trans worlds and constrained the possibilities of trans subjectivity. Notably, exclusions matter. While these histories cannot be erased, agential realism offers a means to reconfigure trans im/possibilities in ways that offer gender justice, even if it is only ever partial. Examples of how more response-able worlds are always already possible are drawn from research in Aotearoa New Zealand. The entry finishes by employing speculative fabulation to reimagine sexuality education in ways that might enact justice for trans students.

Agential realism presents a posthuman onto-epistemology that facilitates nuanced ways of engaging with the production of gender. Some key ways in which cisnormativities privilege particular ways of doing gender premise the need for a nonessentializing means of conceptualizing gender. Agential realism is situated among a range of research and educational approaches that are already engaged in this project. The theory makes a novel contribution to this project via its treatment of matter and discursivity as immanently entangled, which fundamentally reconfigures thinking around how gender may manifest. Definitions and examples of the use of Baradian terms, including phenomena, apparatuses, intra-action, ethico-onto-epistemology, spacetimemattering, and diffraction, demonstrate agential realism’s capacity to expand gender theory. The approach becomes a means of simultaneously engaging with less conventional ways in which gender is already experienced, as well as potentiating more expansive possibilities for gendered becomings. As evidence of its impact, research that has employed agential realist thinking in relation to gender in and beyond educational settings is drawn on to further delineate the field. This includes four subsections—early childhood gender education, secondary school gender and education, tertiary educational genderings, and extracurricular genderings—each of which draws on a range of circumstances and responses to gender. These examples embody leading scholarship at the juncture of agential realism and gender theory, which already offer a diversity of considerations that otherwise would not have been possible.

This chapter is part of a wider conversation around the regulation of trans people’s lives – a discussion that is particularly pertinent to the healthcare sector. While our perspectives are largely informed by Aotearoa New Zealand and Pacific contexts, we situate them among global trends in gender healthcare, impressing the need to continue these critical conversations. We have divided our contributions into three sections. To begin with, we provide key examples of how we may understand gender dynamics and the formation of transnormativities (i.e., expectations around how trans people should exist), based on the concepts of majoritarianism and minoritarianism. We argue that transnormativities tend to function as a mechanism of control, limiting the degree to which trans and gender non-conforming people have agency over their lives, and typically define trans experiences relative to cisgender norms. In the second section, we concentrate on the ways that invisibility and hypervisibility are products of majoritarian categorization, which determine who gets recognized, given space, erased, ignored or a combination of these. We use examples of policy, practice, and standards of care to highlight how healthcare practices currently reify transnormativities. In response to this, we provide suggestions for ways that healthcare providers can collaborate with trans people to de- and re-territorialize these contexts to better serve the needs of trans people. In the third section, we emphasize the entangled nature of majoritarian categories – in particular, gender, sexuality, race, age, class, imperialism and (dis)ability – to encourage healthcare providers to embrace the inherent complexity of engaging with people, and to facilitate a better understanding of how healthcare providers can engage with trans people in practice.