Gender, drama, and life: exploring children's gender performances in Chinese ECEC settings through a power relations lens

This study was conducted in a context where both government policies and early childhood education and care (ECEC) practices in China have paid limited attention to gender. Distinct from previous studies focusing solely on everyday ECEC realities, this research also explores how children ‘perform’ gender within the fictional circumstances created by participatory drama. As the use of drama remains underexplored in ECEC, the study offers an initial examination of its potential for addressing social justice and gender issues through a power relations lens. The overarching aim is to investigate what new knowledge participatory drama can generate about children’s gender performances in Chinese ECEC settings. Specifically, it asks: (1) How do children perform gender through participatory drama? (2) How can these performances be interpreted in relation to their everyday lives? (3) What differences, if any, does participatory drama bring—and why? Situated within a post-structuralist qualitative paradigm, the study employs a reflexive practice-led, multiple-case, and critically ethnographic-featured design. Data were collected through participant observation, interviews, and ‘reflexive practitioner’ as method, with reflexive thematic analysis applied across four ECEC settings in Zhuhai, China. Findings show that while children consistently performed binary and stereotypical gender roles in both everyday life and drama, their enactments in drama were simultaneously more explicit and, paradoxically, more diverse and fluid. Participatory drama thus reveals how deeply gender and educational discourses discipline children while opening spaces for resistance and agency. This study empirically illuminates Butler’s (1990) notion of gender as performative rather than innate, while also demonstrating the potential of participatory drama to recognise and extend gender performativity and fluidity among young children, thereby problematising essentialist gender ideologies shaping ECEC practice and wider social norms.