Tough Princesses and Girly-Boys: Dresses as Sites of Struggle in Swedish Preschools

In this article, I examine how dresses become sites of struggle in Swedish preschools’ gender equality work. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 21 preschool teachers and 112 hours of participant observation with a subset of 10 of them, I analyze how dresses become sites where domination, individual resistance, and solidarity shape possibilities for gender subjectification. In some preschools, domination was enacted through fear, ridicule, and parody, policing boys’ proximity to femininity. In others, solidarity revalued and normalized femininity through passive and explicit permission, symbolic reimagining, and expansive invitation, enabling all children to wear dresses. I argue that when individual resistance is sustained through solidarity, meaningful differentiation emerges, making it possible to reshape what becomes socially intelligible as gender through redoing and, at times, undoing gender. Rather than a permanent achievement, meaningful differentiation is a contingent accomplishment sustained by ongoing relations of power.