Reimagining Professionalism in Precarity: The Everyday Practices of Women Early Childhood Educators in China

• In Event: When Beings Encounter: The Multiplicities of Peace

Proposal

In traditional Chinese culture, gender roles have long been delineated, with women primarily responsible for domestic affairs and men tasked with external responsibilities—a norm encapsulated in the saying “男主外, 女主内” (men manage outside affairs; women manage household responsibilities). For women professionals, particularly wives and mothers in heterosexual relationships, this cultural framing often intersects with career choices. Many women teachers view the early childhood profession as compatible with these expectations, since its extended summer and winter breaks provide flexibility to balance household responsibilities and child-rearing. While this flexibility can support integration of work and family life, it also reinforces the feminization of the early childhood workforce.
Dominant discourses further frame the “ideal” early childhood educator as selfless, nurturing, and emotionally composed. Such framings obscure the material realities of educators’ lives, devalue feminized labor, and reinforce hierarchies over whose professionalism is acknowledged and legitimized. Yet rather than reducing care to purely virtue, many teachers rearticulate it as transformative work. Care, in this framing, becomes an everyday enactment of peace: a practice that resists systemic neglect, sustains community bonds, and opens possibilities for more just and sustainable futures. Guided by two questions, this study asks: How do women early childhood educators in China, situated within gendered, national, and socio-cultural histories, navigate standardized systems, and what does this reveal about the multiplicity of being beyond dominant notions of professionalism? How do their everyday practices of care reconstruct professionalism and reimagine self–other relations, thereby opening possibilities beyond Western paradigms?
The study adopts a theoretical framework that brings together Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (2020), Foucault’s theory of power (1997), and Chinese indigenous feminism to interpret the lived experiences of women early childhood educators in two communities in China. Unlike Western feminist paradigms, Chinese indigenous feminism is rooted in historical and cultural traditions shaped by high power distance, collectivism, and Confucian values (Zhu & Zhang, 2008). By situating women’s labor within a relational ethic of collective responsibility and moral cultivation, this framework resists colonialist applications of Western theory (Zhao, 2001). It opens space for alternative ways of conceptualizing peace and professionalism.
Methodologically, the study draws on a multi-sited ethnography across public and community-based preschools serving diverse populations. Data collection combined participant observation, ethnographic interviews with teachers and directors, and analysis of national and local policy documents. Through field engagement, I centered the voices and experiences of women educators in both majority and minority communities.
This study contributes to the panel by showing how “peace” emerges through the everyday practices of gendered and professional beings in localized contexts of China. By situating professionalism at the intersection of macro-level discourses and micro-level lived experiences, it demonstrates that professionalism is not fixed but dynamic and contested, continually reshaped by political, institutional, and cultural conditions. In doing so, it foregrounds care, emotional labor, and relational expertise as central to educational quality, challenges discourses that render feminized labor invisible or secondary, and highlights the multiplicity of being beyond Western paradigms.

Author

• Yue Qi, Penn State University