Only connect: Troubling oppositions in gender and mathematics

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ways in which many researchers working in the area of gender and mathematics make sense of their data. In particular, it is argued that their use of the oppositional framing, separation versus connection (and others, such as cognition versus affect and objective versus subjective), operates to fix difference, and so to fix gender and mathematics within a structure of binary thinking that ultimately serves to re/produce gender inequalities. The aim is to suggest a more productive approach to understanding the continued gendering of participation in mathematics. This approach is based in deconstructing these oppositional patterns. This theoretical approach is illustrated using readings of interviews with two young mathematics students, Analia and Phil, talking about their relationships with the subject. The paper ends by looking at what this unfixing of difference means for mathematics pedagogy.

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