Children’s agency and CSE-in-action: reproducing, resisting, and reconfiguring gender in early childhood classrooms

Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in early childhood emerges through everyday practices beyond formal curricula. This article examines how children reproduce, resist, and reconfigure gender norms through situated interactions. Drawing on affective sociomaterial ethnography conducted in three Chilean regions (2023–2024), the study combines participant observation in 15 classrooms (children aged 2–4) and 32 interviews with early childhood educators. Four interrelated patterns reveal children’s agency: negotiations of autonomy and consent in care routines; production and contestation of gender in play; affective coexistence shaped by unequal distributions of attention and care; and institutional regulation through adult authority and implicit curricular norms. We argue that CSE-in-action constitutes a relational, situated pedagogy embedded in institutional and material conditions. Children actively co-produce norms, boundaries, and possibilities for being with others, reframing early childhood CSE as an everyday ethics of care and interaction rather than solely a formal curricular endeavour.