Emergent Life: Opening Our Lives to Differenciation and to Response-Ability,as We Turn Our Critical Gaze on the Enunciative Regularities That Hold the World the Same

Abstract

In this article, I explore a range of concepts that enable those of us who work with children to break free from some of those enunciative regularities that function to hold the way things are, in place. The term “enunciative regularities” comes from Foucault, who advocated breaking open words and propositions to find what work they do, what systems they perpetuate. The way we speak the world into existence, and the ways we interpret that mode of speaking, can be taken for granted, by us, as the unquestionable truth of the world and of ourselves. We are, in general, not very accomplished at turning our reflexive gaze on the words and propositions that we are enmeshed in, and thus are not readily able to break them open. Turning our critical gaze on those enunciative regularities is vital, I suggest, if we want to bring about change in the way we order the world—and the ways the world orders us. The work of philosophy, in developing new concepts, enables us to look and to listen differently, and to creatively evolve beyond some of our unquestioned enunciative entrapments.

Introduction

In this article, I explore a range of concepts that enable those of us who work with children to break free from some of those enunciative regularities that function to hold the way things are, in place. The term “enunciative regularities” comes from Foucault, who advocated breaking open words and propositions to find what work they do, what systems they perpetuate (Deleuze, 2006, pp. 45–48). The way we speak the world into existence, and the ways we interpret that mode of speaking, can be taken for granted, by us, as the unquestionable truth of the world and of ourselves. We are, in general, not very accomplished at turning our reflexive gaze on the words and propositions that we are enmeshed in, and thus are not readily able to break them open (B. Davies et al., 2004). Turning our critical gaze on those enunciative regularities is vital, I suggest, if we want to bring about change in the way we order the world—and the ways the world orders us. The work of philosophy, in developing new concepts, enables us to look and to listen differently, and to creatively evolve beyond some of our unquestioned enunciative entrapments.

New concepts can inspire us to become, and go on becoming different, that is, to open ourselves to what Deleuze called differenciation—that is, to fluidity and multiplicity, to emergent life, where life unfolds itself in relation to others, to both human and more-than-human others, intra-acting, affecting and being affected by our encounters with others. Differenciation (spelled with a “c”) is almost the opposite of differentiating (with a “t”). Deleuzian differenciation refers to movement, to the ongoing unfolding of difference—differencing we might have called it. To differentiate, in contrast, is to slot difference into existing categories. We make ourselves, and the world, recognizable and safe by fitting ourselves and each other into established categories, and by measuring and judging ourselves and each other against them. Are you the same or are you different, we ask each other, and sameness, not difference, is generally what we choose to affiliate with, abjecting that which is different or other.

New Concepts: Opening Ourselves to Differenciation

New philosophical concepts and processes like lines of flight and emergent listening facilitate analysis of our enunciative entrapments. Reflecting on the systems that speak the world into existence can create differencing, fluidity, life unfolding, a flexibility that is not limited by accepted regularities. These concepts can generate differenciation that evolves beyond what has previously not been questioned.

Lines of Flight

Taking off in Deleuzian lines of flight that go beyond what we know already is both risky and vital. The 1970s and 1980s were a time when, collectively, lines of flight were taking off in multiple directions. Enunciative regularities, particularly those that defined sex/gender, were being challenged. Anti-discrimination laws were passed. Anti-gay laws were abolished. Feminist poststructuralist writers were opening up thought in exciting ways.

There was, of course, a great deal of pushing and pulling between those who wanted to maintain the status quo and those who were bringing about change. I was told, for example, in the early 1980s, that I would not be promoted as long as I published in feminist journals, or indeed in any “applied” journals. Application smacked of activism and was not to be tolerated. And when, in the mid 1980s, I went searching for feminist stories to read to children in my study of preschool children and gender, I encountered hostile booksellers who sniffed “we don’t keep that sort of book here.” The more open-minded booksellers laughed at my request, saying “we only get those in at Christmas when aunties are looking for something different for their nieces.”

But there were feminist stories, and I eventually tracked them down. There were wonderful heroes like Elizabeth, the Paperbag Princess, who outwitted the dragon and saved Prince Ronald—before giving him up as a lost cause (Munsch & Martchenko, 1980). And there were boys like Oliver Button who wanted to dance. Oliver was mercilessly bullied by the big boys—but continued dancing nonetheless (de Paola, 1981). These stories were generally heroic tales of struggle against the over-determined, and over-coded nature of gender identity (B. Davies, 1989), struggles, you might say, against enunciative regularities.

Those same tensions between keeping gender categories intact and breaking them open, played themselves out in the preschool playgrounds that I observed in my study. When Geoffrey, for example, tried on the black velvet skirt and twirled himself around in a magic moment of absorbed pleasure, a smaller boy broke into his idyll, rushing up and punching him. Geoffrey abandoned the black velvet skirt, and, stamping his foot and kicking the smaller boy, he shouted “now I’ve got more pants on,” and the smaller boy fled.

There were the two girls who decided to join the boys, to fight the fires. The boys had put on the two new firefighters’ helmets they’d found in the dressing up cupboard, declaring they were going to fight the fire. The girls dressed their dollies with hats, and with their dollies in their strollers they rushed out to join the boys fighting the fire. But the boys weren’t having it. They threw “fire” at the dollies, shouting that they were going to burn the girls’ babies. The girls fled with their strollers back into the home corner, crying out “the boys have burned our babies! Quick, let’s hide!” There was to be no further fire fighting for the girls that day, as they excitedly took up the all-too-familiar routines of feminine vulnerability. Each day I observed the violent policing of the gender binary, but there were, as well, multiple, joyful—and sometimes fearful—lines of flight beyond it.

The advent of neoliberalism in the Thatcher and Reagan era, was at least in part a reaction to, and a concerted quelling of, the challenges to the status quo that had erupted in those decades. Although Thatcher and Reagan are long gone, neoliberalism, the brainchild of Harvard economists, has its stranglehold on most democratic governments and on education systems and workplaces (Bansel & Davies, 2007; B. Davies, 2020). Measuring and assessing children dominates educational practice. Although children are, to a significant extent, the intra-active products of neoliberal systems of thought and practice, they come to believe, within those same systems’ enunciative regularities, that their individual identities are a matter of their own choice. When they stray from the established order of things, they are pathologized, and encouraged to think of the so-called pathology as their own responsibility to remedy. What matters, what is made to matter in neoliberal enunciative regularities, is financial profit, growth, and productivity (J. S. Davies & Standring, 2023).

Creative relational spaces are increasingly necessary to release us from the regulated, competitive, individualized, categorized subjecthood of liberal humanism and neoliberalism. The life that emerges in creative relational spaces, is responsive, open to the life of the other, and it is response-able to the biosphere:

the attraction of life to life . . . . biophilia theory implies that life longs to marry life, to acquaint itself with life, to cohabit with life. For the speaking, singing, dancing, painting human this can be described as the biosphere having a call. The heart lifts, either in fear or in wonder, and wants to provide an echo to that call. (Day, 2022, p. 113)

Our lives depend on those responsive, symbiotic relations with which we cohabit, not only with human lives, but all lives that exist within the biosphere, even lives we might previously have thought of as inanimate or negligible life forms:

One of the wondrous parts of biology is that it shows us that living beings—including ourselves—are not what we thought . . . We are now beginning to realize that “individuals” aren’t particularly individual at all . . . every “I” is also a “we..” . .[and] sustaining life requires sustaining symbioses. (McFall-Ngai, 2017, pp. M51-2, M67)

Emergent Listening

I conducted a second preschool study in a Reggio Emilia preschool in Sweden in the mid 20-teens (B. Davies, 2014). I came to understand there that “The continuity of life, its capacity to endure, depends not only on normative reiterations, but on the creative acts that open up difference, differenciation and the creative evolution of the new” (B. Davies, 2021, p. 96). Creative evolution requires of us that we learn to listen rather than to judge. Such listening, which I have called emergent listening (B. Davies, 2016), is open to the processes of differenciation, to what it doesn’t know. Its borders are open. Emergent listening works against the established self of the listener with its enunciative regularities. It opens us to our latent biophilia, our entangled, vital materialities, and to an awareness of our capacity to intra-act, to affect each other, to respond to the attraction of life to life. While we may lose some of our certitudes, “Our capacity to affect each other, to enter into composition with others both enhances our specificity and expands our capacity for thought and action” (B. Davies, 2014, p. 20).

Early on, I encountered a boy with whom I first learned the art of emergent listening. I wrote at the time:

At the end of this first group session, instead of going off to his allocated group activity, one boy decides to show me his favorite picture book. We sit together in animated discussion over his favorite picture, discussing its intricacies, he in Swedish and me in English. It is an exciting picture, with a bank in the middle and a tunnel under the bank through which robbers are crawling. One robber has already successfully robbed the bank and is running away. There are cowboys and indians on horses fighting, and a cowboy buying an ice cream at an ice cream parlor. There are dogs barking and exotic mountains in the distance. There is much here for us to discuss. He tells a teacher, who briefly comes into the room to check that we are OK, that he finds it really exciting to talk to me—and indeed he is visibly excited, sometimes clutching his genitals in an ecstasy of delight—a haecceity found in the just-thisness of the emergent moment in which we are completely absorbed in the picture, in the book, and in our communication with each other. The teacher later tells me that she had been surprised at his visible and voluble animation, since he is a boy who rarely speaks. (B. Davies, 2014, pp. 14–15)

The boy who didn’t usually speak initiated an encounter with me, perhaps attracted to me as someone who, also, did not usually speak. He and I, together with a book, moved outside the teacher’s plans for the day. When the teacher, and the other children, left the room, he opened the book at his favorite page, and we sat down together to explore the intricacies of his picture. As he drew my attention to his favorite details, he would look at my face to see if I was attending, then, pleased, he told me more, laughing as he did so. He drew me into his world and the world of the book, and we immersed ourselves in the attraction of life to life. The life of a boy who is usually silent and a visiting researcher who can’t speak Swedish, and a magic book. I couldn’t obey any impulse I might have had to re-territorialize the space with teacherly enunciations in which I would direct, and he would follow. Instead, I found myself listening to the sound of his voice, reading his body language and his facial expressions, opening myself up to his idea, his pleasure. His happiness spilled over and became my happiness too—a mutually inspired biophilia—the response of life to life. Our difference from each other, in particular our language difference, far from being a problem, was an asset in opening us up to what we could each become in relation to each other and the picture in the book.

Emergent listening enables us to be open to the life of the children we encounter, not judging them according to the established enunciative regularities, but becoming, emerging in intra-action with them. We need to discover the ways that enable us “to go beyond partialities, . . . to pass from a ‘limited sympathy’ to an ‘extended generosity,’ . . . to stretch passions and give them an extension that they don’t have on their own” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 46). The ethics that informs such work is fundamentally relational, and response-able, where response-ability is “a matter of the ability to respond. Listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self” (Barad, 2011, p. 69).

As Barad argues, there is no single mo(ve)ment we might find ourselves immersed in that does not require of us to ask what it is that is being made to matter, and how it is being made to matter.

For some children, however, there are no humans who have time or inclination to listen to them. Nevertheless, the biosphere calls them, and they respond. In a deeply moving, Danish story called Common room rocking horse (Voetmann, 2023), the author takes us into the life of a boy in an orphanage. The narrator, the boy now an adult, begins the tale of his childhood with an ironic, self-deprecating account of his own imagined birth, in which there was little or no sense of connection:

Someone did give birth to me. Why remains unclear. Maybe they wanted to be loved, or it just sort of happened. It’s unlikely they’re alive. Then again, modern medicine. But so much time has passed since the fruitless event . . . From the moment they fished me out, I was never alone again, never again part of someone else. I sat there like an utterance, the answer to a question no one had asked or thought needed asking. With these saggy cheeks and dopey eyebrows. I’m not suggesting anyone ever wished to give birth to something like me specifically. (Voetmann, 2023, p. 47)

The children fought over, and loved, the rocking horse in the orphanage common room, he tells us. You could easily drag toddlers in diapers off it, he explains, and then they would lie on the floor, bawling, while you took your turn on the horse, singing along with the sound and rhythm of rocking and the pitiful sound of the toddler’s cries.

Although no one willed you into the world, the people in the orphanage shape you, making you recognizable as human with words and manners:

. . . they wrap you up in language and table manners to make it look like there’s a purpose behind it all, like it’s not just, not just nothing, nothing in the world, but a something which although neither imagined nor hoped for did sprout in someone’s belly once, was fished out and given table manners. (Voetmann, 2023, p. 47).

Attraction of life to life is not reserved solely for humans, or even for animals. We can, as I explored in my book with Jane Speedy (Davies & Speedy, 2024), intra-act with a tree, or a bird, or a pond, or even a gun, a piano, or a rocking horse. As Bennett (2010, p. 231) observes, there are “nonhuman vitalities actively at work around and within us.” Riding the rocking horse, the boy would momentarily lose his wrapped up, regulated self, and connect with the more-than-human life of the horse:

Only the rocking horse’s eyes were free of hate. Technically, it was one eye, a hole drilled through its head, all the way through the slab of wood. Round and empty, unity and absence combined . . . . Sitting on the common room rocking horse, I leaned forward and vanished a bit in its rocking, forgot a little. From each side I stuck my fingers inside the eyehole. Where the fingertips met we were together. (Voetmann, 2023, p. 52)

That connection of finger with finger, of self with horse, Deleuze (1997, pp. 28–29) might call haecceity, or immanent life:

The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens . . . It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence.

In Halsey’s (2007, p. 146) words, that life of pure immanence, its singularity, is “like when a swimming body becomes-wave and is momentarily suspended in nothing but an intensity of forces and rhythms.” The boy’s fingertips meeting as he leans forward and rocks with the rhythm of the horse—is just such a moment—becoming one with himself and the horse in the rocking and the meeting of his two fingers inside the horse’s head.

In the love of life for life, in the emergence of that love, the boy finds sympathy in the common room horse, the horse that the toddlers in diapers wept to be parted from. The horse’s left ear was ragged leather, and “the right ear was long eroded by toddlers’ chewing and fondling” (Voetmann, 2023, p. 52). Sympathy, such as that which flows between the boy and the horse, is a creative emotion like love or joy. It reaches through intuition toward a reality outside itself, “it reaches the material in matter, the vital in living forms, the social in societies, the personal in individual existences” (Lapoujade, 2019, np). Through sympathy and the flow in-between, we exceed ourselves, we become more-than-human.

Sympathy overrides the inertia of normality, of the over-coded, regulated self, and its resistance to change. It releases us from ordinariness, from the press toward the repetition of the same. Sympathy, in this sense, leads to openness to the in-between of oneself and another, oneself and a rocking horse, oneself and a black velvet skirt, oneself and a book, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, p. 12) account, between the orchid and the wasp. And in this article, now, between the writer and the reader of the rocking horse story.

In contemplating the work art does in engendering those connections, Grosz writes about particles of bodies, both human and more-than-human, being exchanged. These are, she says, “not imaginative becomings . . . but material becomings . . . in which life folds over itself to embrace its contact with materiality, in which each exchanges some elements or particles with the other to become more and other” (Grosz, 2008, p. 23). The particles of a rocking horse’s ear, for example, exchanging elements of children’s tears and saliva and song.

Mastery and Submission: Enunciative Regularities

What then of those formidable forces, those enunciative regularities, that hold everything the same—the words and manners, for example, that make us recognizable as ourselves? We not only depend on them, we submit to the order they establish. We gain mastery within that order, affirming ourselves. Simultaneously, our acquisition of mastery affirms the very order which defined what would count as mastery. Butler (2013) calls this the paradoxical simultaneity of mastery and submission. We submit, we learn language and table manners, and in becoming recognizable subjects, we affirm that which we have submitted to.

Very often adults who work with and care for children, are intent on mastery and submission—on keeping that emergent life-force, that attraction of life to life, under control. Educational institutions, these days, are required to shape the perfect, neoliberal subject, who will increase the competitiveness and the productivity of the nation. Such a subject will be intent on its own mastery and will not question or challenge the system that their mastery both affirms and depends on.

“Working on oneself,” in neoliberal institutions such as schools and workplaces, is defined as essential to overcoming one’s weaknesses and pathologies to gain mastery. In time, each neoliberalized subject will take up whatever practices will make it competitive with others. Regular exercise, multiple medications, mental health counseling, and at the extreme, cosmetic surgery, will be called on to assist in the production of the appropriate and appropriated subject. The boy, now a man, will get his eyebrows done, and Botox injections, and perhaps even cosmetic surgery to improve his flabby cheeks. The beauty and physical fitness industries, and many social media and IT platforms, along with idols in the entertainment industry, feed on the desire and self-blame of those vulnerable, neoliberalized subjects.

The shaping of the children in my Swedish study was barely visible. The teachers and children had a seamless compact with each other, and rarely needed to negotiate what would count as acceptable behavior. It was a joyful place, and I loved being there.

One day a new boy, a migrant, arrived at the school. The son of African musicians, he was full of life and laughter and energy. When I arrived each morning, the Swedish children were diffident about greeting me, hesitant to try out the English language greetings that they’d been practicing. Desmond, the new boy, in contrast, rushed to open the gate, and drew me across the threshold of the preschool, his face, his body, his voice, lit up in welcome.

Around that time, Reggio Emilia preschools were engaged in a project focused on place. Children were invited to choose a place in the preschool that would be, for the months that the project lasted, their place. The group that Desmond was a member of, chose a space in the indoor piazza, where there was a small stage with curtains at the front. The teachers were surprised at their choice. The other groups had chosen trees and rocks in the playground. The teachers’ interpretation of how such a space might be inhabited was that the children would be the audience to the teachers’ performances. It was an innocent mistake.

The children sat quietly in a row of seats while they waited for the two teachers to dress up behind closed doors, before rushing in to perform the small play they had devised. But Desmond could not conceal his boredom with the teachers’ reading of how their place should be lived. He quietly got up off his seat and made his way to the child-sized stage located behind the teachers. He pulled the curtains open with a dramatic flourish and began to dance. Shocked, the teachers pulled him down from the stage, and reprimanded him, sitting him down beside them. When they let him go, he jumped up, determined to return to the stage, to show them how the children themselves might make an entertaining performance. The visibly upset teachers gripped his hands hard, insisting that he remain seated close by them.

While the Swedish children had accepted and maintained the compact, even if the teachers’ performances were not at all what they had imagined they would be doing, Desmond had a strong sense of what a good performance could be. From the teachers’ point of view, however, Desmond was engaging in inexplicable, perhaps even pathological, behavior, insofar as he failed to “know his place,” that is, to respect the preschool’s enunciative regularities.

In many classrooms throughout the world, the power of the teacher is constantly and overtly exercised, in some cases amounting to coercive control. This may be especially so when the teacher has highly valued knowledge desired by the children and their parents.

In the podcast, The Turning: Room of Mirrors, Lantz (2023) explores submission and mastery in the world of children who wish to become elite ballerinas. Lim, in turn, reflects on Lantz’s podcast, and on what it reveals about the teaching of the much-admired choreographer George Balanchine:

The dancers are based in a building without windows in the rehearsal rooms. “We don’t need windows because the outside world doesn’t matter,” one ballet dancer says. “We had our own universe.”

“What are you looking at, dear?” Balanchine asks one dancer, as she watches herself in the mirror. “You can’t see you. Only I can see you.” . . .

One of his most iconic ballerinas, Gelsey Kirkland, even asks her dentist for buck teeth to resemble his favourite ballerina at the time . . . .

He had relationships with six of his dancers, one of whom is said to have had four abortions. The dancers competed for his favour, even as prepubescent children, while the ballet mothers both desired and feared that he would choose their daughters to be, as one put it, “another Lolita in his ballerina gallery.”

Yet the dancers still talk of Mr B with reverence, describing themselves as being “christened” and “graced” by proximity to him. (Lim, 2023, p. 20)

Foucault (1980) described such training as the disciplining and taming of the girls’ bodies. Mr. B, with the parents’ encouragement, created a classroom in which his power over the children’s bodies and emotions was absolute.

Creating Transformations

How might we create, in contrast to such places of total control, the spaces in which children, and the adults in their lives, can be open to differenciation—to emergent life? How can we make them safe inside the predictable order of things, while able to tune into the haecceity of each moment—not cramped by the thought of what those moments should be? How might children learn to intra-act with others, both human and more-than-human? And how might we learn to intra-act with them, that is to listen, and to be open to being affected? How do we make space for children to become both competent in the terms of enunciative regularities and routine expectations, while open to emergent life and its response-abilities?

When I first saw Francesca in the Swedish preschool, she looked ultra-feminine, like her older sister and her mother, both with long blonde hair and elegant feminine dress. One morning she looked so different that I mistook her for a boy when I first saw her running fast through the forest with her short hair, blue jeans and striped, purple t-shirt. As her mother told the story of her transformation, Francesca had been caught in the act of cutting off her beautiful, long hair, causing her mother serious distress. She had taken her to the hairdresser, who had created a stylish, androgynous cut that made her look like a girl from one side and a boy from the other. On that day when I saw her running, she had on pink nail polish, suggesting that her cut was not a simple renunciation of the feminine, but an opening up of possibilities, such as play-fighting in the forest with the boys, yelling, and clashing swords with them in furious battle—even becoming their leader. With that cut she had transformed herself, with her mother’s and the hairdresser’s help, into both male and female—and perhaps even neither.

But linguistically, socially, institutionally, the enunciative and social/structural regularities require us to be either/or. We are differentiated, slotted into existing categories, required to actively hold in place the tediously repetitive enunciative regularity of the dichotomous, two-sex model of sex and sexuality.

As Griffiths (2018) elaborates, the medical professions has long intervened to create and maintain that dichotomous, two-sex model of sex and sexuality, insisting that each individual’s psychological and physical sex must be congruent, and if they are not, must be made so: “As scholars have pointed out, both intersex and trans individuals have been pathologized by the medical profession’s insistence on a strict binary model of sex, gender and sexuality; this is true in the past and in the contemporary context” (p. 2). The guidelines for dealing with anomalous or non-conforming sex/gender, which were developed at Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s “recommended early surgical intervention on genitals that did not conform to cultural ideas of what male and female genitals should look like, and [advocated] consistent rearing in one corresponding gender” (Griffiths, 2018, p. 3). Accordingly, “Individuals with intersex variations were (and continue to be) subject to experimental medical treatments often without consent or disclosure” (Griffiths, 2018, p. 9).

Despite numerous protests by young intersex people about operations performed on them before they were old enough to consent, and numerous United Nations condemnations of those surgeries as human rights violations, the practice continues (Knight, 2021). “Even after years of criticism from intersex people, many providers are quick to perform surgery on bodies of babies and young children that they consider abnormal” (Davis et al., 2016, p. 491).

It is estimated that 1.7 % of children are born intersex, that is, with genitals that are not clearly either male or female. And there are increasing numbers of children who struggle with the dichotomous, two-sex model of sex and sexuality, a model that constitutes a lack of match between an individual’s sex and their gender to be a pathology in need of remediation—even to the extent of surgical remediation of boys’ penises to ensure they can be like other boys and stand up to pee, or else (it is said) suffer psychological trauma.

The problem lies, I suggest, in the dichotomous, two-sex model of sex and sexuality and the pathologizing of difference, rather than in the children. They cannot easily be separated, however, as it is the submission to the dichotomous, two-sex model of sex and sexuality, that makes the model real (Butler, 2013). As such, it is built into our institutions, our enunciative regularities, our social practices and thence our identities.

When you first go to school, for example, you have to know which is the “right” toilet for you to enter. On her first day of school, my goddaughter was bullied and harassed by the older girls who blockaded the entrance to the girls’ toilet, telling her she could not enter and must go to the boys’ toilets. The haircut, which she had chosen for herself, was a stylish, androgynous cut. After careful consideration, she chose to grow her hair long rather than be subjected to such humiliation. The girls’ pushback against her line of flight, held the dichotomous two-sex model firmly in place.

In Francesca’s family, princess-style femininity was evidently valued. At her preschool, strong girls too could flourish. The playground provided space for girls to swing high on the swings, giant rocks to scale and a forest to run through. It offered the possibility that girls could wear jeans and t-shirts similar to the boys. For Francesca, all of these forces were at work to produce a playful, rebellious/experimental moment of hair-cutting that was an unfolding of difference—not of categorical difference but of emergent differencing.

The boys Francesca played war with, after the cut and the change of clothing, also moved back and forth between going with the flow of the transformation, following Francesca as if she were their leader, and then reverting to the enunciative regularities that turned their following into the chasing of a potential victim. The socio-linguistic binary is both tenacious and resilient. It has an astonishing power to resurge. Fashion, social media, neoliberalism with its hunger for profit, play their part in making hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity desirable. But the resilience and resurgence of binary gender lies not just in the language and in social and virtual practices, but in the habituated ways we have of seeing the world.

My own grandson, a decade ago, when he was only 4 years old, burst into the bathroom when I was having a shower. Confronted by my short hair in a world where all the girls and women had long hair, he wanted to establish what I really was. Male or female? He stared at me for a few seconds and then announced that I had a penis and no boobies. I laughed and said no Sammy, I don’t have a penis and I do have boobies. No you don’t, he said, Mummy has boobies. What was so astonishing to me was that he could see the penis he suspected I surely must have.

At the moment of Francesca’s cut, she could not have known or analyzed all the forces working for and against the act she was intent on carrying out. The movement between being strong and competent, and pretty and feminine, formed a complex dance in between the multiple forces that territorialize and deterritorialize bodies. We may desire the order and predictability that enunciative regularities may bring. And children grant adults the power to control them. But where emergent life is at risk of being extinguished (through boredom or injustice for example, or from overly rigid insistence on the enunciative regularities of binary formations of gender) the power to resist may be strong enough to generate a line of flight:

The power of the line of flight is that it provides an escape route from established patterns and coherences. The line of flight is creative and experimental; it is not concerned with coding or overcoding but with mutation. This is not about the great ruptures in systems but “the little crack, the imperceptible ruptures” which enable lines of flight to slip into gaps, everywhere. (Stark, 2017, p. 91, citing Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 131)

The cut, in Francesca’s case, we might say, was a line of flight that slipped into a gap outside the binary, while at the same time the enunciative regularities were at work, re-territorializing her.

Today, a decade later, the increased access to the medical technology of sex/gender re-assignment, and the idea of transitioning being made readily available and desirable on social and other media, a child’s rebellion against their overly-coded gender may be read as an expression of who s/he “really” is. Neoliberalism promotes the psychologism that what each individual “chooses” to become, reveals their essential, individual self. If a child wants to be the sex/gender other than the one they were born with, it must be because they “really” are that which they imagine/desire. Not a creative line of flight, then, that provides an escape route from established patterns and coherences of the binary, but an affirmation of the binary—the necessity of transitioning from one to the other, affirming the very order of the gender binary itself.

It is ironic, then, that some adults who have undergone those medical interventions, to become one and not the other in keeping with the enunciative regularities that dictate there can only be two genders, now claim themselves to be non-binary, belonging in a third category of people who form their new community of trans and queer people, collectively celebrating their freedom to move back and forth and in-between, no longer trapped in the straightjackets of dichotomous masculinity or femininity (Olson et al., 2023).

(In)conclusion

In this article, I have explored a range of concepts that enable those of us who work with children to break free from some of those enunciative regularities that function to hold in place the way things are. I have focused on the multiple possibilities of life that the collectivities we are part of make possible, thinkable, desirable. Through the specificity of I, we collectively speak the world into existence, and it speaks us back in return. We become passionately attached to one version of ourselves or another, we rebel against enunciative regularities that feel like they control us too much, just as we get swept up in other enunciations that take us collectively down paths we rarely stop to question.

When new possibilities emerge, we and our children need the courage and confidence to play with them, the critical skills to evaluate them, and the ethical know-how to manage them without harm. Such ethical know-how is “a matter of the ability to respond. Listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self” (Barad, 2011, p. 69). There is no single mo(ve)ment we might find ourselves immersed in that does not require of us to ask what it is that is being made to matter, and how it is being made to matter. The attraction of life to life, the joyful encounter with emergent differences, the openness to the biosphere through emergent listening, and through sympathy, all these involve creative relationality and the immanence of emergent life.