A sociology instructor at the taxpayer-funded University of Michigan has published an academic journal article exposing America’s preschool classrooms as hotbeds of “heteronormative play” where “traditional fairy tales” persist and “heterosexuality is always assumed, expected, ordinary, and privileged.”
The University of Michigan instructor behind the exposé of sexuality in preschool life is Heidi M. Gansen, according to Campus Reform.
Sociology of Education, a quarterly journal, published the July 14 article entitled “Reproducing (and Disrupting) Heteronormativity: Gendered Sexual Socialization in Preschool Classrooms.”
To conduct her research, Gansen observed unsuspecting little kids in nine preschool classrooms in Michigan for almost a year.
She found that “heteronormativity” is rampant in the preschool classrooms. In laymen’s terms, the word “heteronormative” means that people aren’t gay and don’t cross-dress.
Preschools promote “practices that facilitate heteronormativity in classrooms” and the “reproduction of inequalities pertaining to gender and sexuality,” Gansen writes.
Heterosexual behavior is “produced” and “enforced” by teachers and — somehow — by little preschool kids, the taxpayer-funded sociologist explains.
For example, preschool girls like to play “house” and they mimic the behavior of their mothers. To whatever extent the boys also play “house,” they don’t act like mothers. Instead, they act like fathers.
Gansen says she observed that preschool kids find it weird if a girl tries to act like a father. She expresses shock and sadness that “children did not allow cross-gender roles.”
Teachers who say a boy has a “crush” on a girl or who read “traditional fairy tales” in class also perpetuate “heteronormative play,” Gansen declares.
Another mistake preschool teachers make is to assume that preschool boys who express affection toward other boys — and preschool girls who express affection toward other girls — are just being “friendly” and are not sexually expressing “same-gender signs of affection or homosocial behaviors.”
Gansen helpfully suggests that America’s preschool teachers need to start disrupting all this “heteronormative” behavior. They need to start telling little preschool kids how great gay marriage is, she write, according to Campus Reform.
Without such active disruption, Gansen warns, “heteronormativity” is “already ingrained in children by ages 3 to 5.”
“Additionally, my data suggest young children are learning in preschool that boys have gendered power over girls’ bodies,” Gansen charges in the abstract explaining her journal article.
Gansen’s Facebooks likes include Elizabeth Warren, Organizing for Action (former President Barack Obama’s community organizing project) and, of course, Shaun King
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