Productive networks of knowledge/power: gender and Mathematics on student analysis

Abstract

This paper presents some of the results of an investigation whose development in the initial stage took place with ten students from the ninth year of elementary school and the first year of high school who participated in a preparatory course for admission to the Federal Institute of Minas Gerais. This work is part of the research project entitled “Where do we learn to live the genre? In math classes!”. In this excerpt, the aim was to understand how students understand and experience gender issues in their daily lives [school, but not only], especially in their consequences and relations with mathematics as a science. The results presented here are from two meetings held virtually with students due to the Covid-19 pandemic. From an understanding of the mathematics curriculum as a space-time boundary between knowledge, seeking support in postcolonial theories, the question “what does mathematics have to do with gender issues?”, opened the meetings and led the selection of materials that had the role of triggering the discussions, such as news circulating in the media, research results presented in several reports dealing with the theme and institutional videos that address the themes relevant to the development of the investigation. All the work of construction and data treatment was carried out in the light of Foucault's discourse analysis. In this text, two statements will be presented, namely: “the [invisible] contribution of women to the development of society” and “women do not like mathematics”. Both statements were treated from an understanding of gender as discursively produced, in a Butlerian understanding of the term and of school mathematics as cultural policy. This qualitative research revealed that gender performances are still markedly stereotyped in the students' experiences, while there is an ascending process of engagement and questioning of the spaces to which the bodies that perform the feminine can or cannot, occupy, spaces in which mathematical knowledge predominates, for example. Therefore, these spaces are problematized by students participating in the research, fraying the boundary between knowledge.