Gender and Mathematics: discursive chains and difference production on academic articles published in Brazil between 2009 and 2019

Abstract

The bibliographic study that supports this paper mapped Education articles on the relations between gender and Mathematics, published in Brazilian academic journals between 2009 and 2019.The analyzed corpus was made up of 25 papers and their analysis sought to show potentials and weaknesses, questions and commitments, ruptures and entanglements that involve two different analytical gender approaches identified in the texts. We distinguished them in two groups: 1. those who use gender as a variable to analyze different aspects that permeate educational processes in relation to mathematics; 2. those who use gender as an analytical category to understand gender and Mathematics relations at school and in other social spaces. The results suggest a growing concern about gender relations in Mathematics Education studies, but they also warn about the risk of such studies being inserted in a citational chain that reiterates principles that presuppose and produce the difference between men and women, boys and girls, concerning mathematical practices. However, they announce possibilities of cracks in this discursive chain, which can lead to more detailed questions and investigations about how the process of difference production takes place on mathematics and gender, and subsidize the reflection on what is taken as a mathematical parameter in these practices. They also point out the need to activate other categories (such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, generation, territory) in their intersection with gender and mathematics, to expand understanding and strengthen the confrontation of inequalities.

Gender relations; Mathematics; Mathematics Education; Women and men