A recent research paper suggests that preschool teachers are the reason most people identify as heterosexual.“Reproducing (and Disrupting) Heteronormativity: Gendered Sexual Socialization in Preschool Classrooms,” published last month in the journal Sociology of Education, is based a sociology researcher’s observations of nine different preschool classrooms over the course of 10 months.
Heidi Gansen, a University of Michigan doctoral student whose research interests include gender and sexuality and childhood, concludes that preschool teachers are both constructing and disrupting gendered sexuality in multiple ways.
“[H]eteronormativity permeates” these classrooms to such an extent that preschoolers learn “that boys have gendered power over girls’ bodies,” Gansen writes in the abstract. ...
