King and Queen, Mummy and Daddy: Role Play, Gender Categorisation and Cis-Heteronormativity in a UK Preschool Setting

Children are socialised to understand themselves and others through gender categories. However, there are few observational studies of how this happens in social interaction. Based on video-recorded interactions at a UK preschool nursery setting, this study uses ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to examine the extent and ways cis-heteronormativity is reproduced through gendered descriptions in interactions involving children and adults in preschool role-play activities. The everyday play activities of 26 children (3–4 years old) were video-recorded over a period of 6 months, totalling 7 hours of recordings. Four episodes of role play were identified in which children used gendered descriptions to organise and allocate roles to themselves and other children. One adult used gendered descriptions to validate or correct the children's role allocations. The children's and the adult's actions in many ways reproduced cis-heteronormative assumptions of identities and relationships. These assumptions were integral to the ways in which they made sense of one another's actions and organised their participation within emerging role-play scenes. The children's role allocations nevertheless sometimes departed from cis-normative expectations, thus leading to a composite picture. This study contributes to a growing body of research that highlights the ways in which gender normativities can shape interaction.