The infant/toddler teacher as willful subject: A critical narrative analysis of gendered discursive regimes in US-based early care and education

Dominant narratives of teacher emotion in early care and education rely on historical discourses of white femininity and white maternalism to position early childhood teachers as naturally adept and selfless caretakers of young children. Missing from these narratives, however, is the reality that emotion-display rules and norms are often enforced on teachers through surveillance and social control, and that teachers whose emotion displays veer outside the bounds of the dominant narratives experience punitive professional and personal backlash. This qualitative case study utilizes critical narrative analysis and post-structural feminist perspectives to explore the emotional experiences of Lauren, a white, female infant/toddler teacher, as she navigated the emotional experience of teaching during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA. The data is drawn from a larger study guided by the following research question: “What are the emotional experiences of early childhood teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic?” The findings in this article leverage Michel Foucault's concept of the “docile body” and Sara Ahmed's concept of the “willful subject” to interpret themes of discursive enforcement and teacher resistance to teacher emotion-display norms and rules. These findings problematize the dominant construction of the idealized emotional landscape of early care and education and present in its place a portrait of surveillance and resistance in a discursive struggle of power against emotional will.