Silence on Gender in the Danish Daycare Regime

Abstract: 'Silence' in one word grasps the gendered structures within the Danish daycare regime. Through a rearticulation of this notion a detailed inquiry of processes with gendered effects within the public administration of the daycare regime is carried out. Though public daycare is an universal welfare service with political attention where gender-issues are very present, and a general gender-mainstreaming obligation is formulated in Danish legislation, the public policies on daycare do not encounter social constructivist conceptions of gender. Official documents and interviews both at national, municipal, and local level together constitute the primary empirical sources in an investigation of how the public administration of the daycare regime contributes to a construction of silence on gender-perspectives. Narratives in and around the public administration of the daycare regime are identified in a poststructuralist, feminist analysis. It is found that tendencies towards New Public management are present in the daycare regime; educational ideals dominate; biologist-essentialist notions of gender are the norm; the individual child is in focus; and a complex, decentralized government of the daycare regime has effects on gendered structures. The discursive formations within daycare are intertextually connected, and certain logics of governmentality following the lines of the narratives mentioned above constitutes a daycare regime which is silent on critical gender perspectives. Gender is rather absent as a theme, structural perspectives on pedagogy are 'othered', and social constructivist perceptions of children's gender identities are silenced. The silence in the public administration is a barrier to everyday pedagogical practices' encountering of gender critically.