When girls do masculinity like boys do: establishing gender heteroglossia in school mathematics participation
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When girls do masculinity like boys do: establishing gender heteroglossia in school mathematics participation Felicia Jaremus 1 Received: 1 April 2020 / Revised: 21 July 2020 / Accepted: 2 October 2020 # Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia, Inc. 2020
Abstract While mathematics education research has become increasingly concerned with issues of equity, including girls’ participation in the subject, the field remains troubled with conceptualising and operationalising gender. To date, few studies of gender and school mathematics participation have moved beyond conflating gender with sex or categorising masculinities and femininities through the body. This failure to engage with gender conceptualisation has persisted despite the apparent intractability of girls’ underrepresentation in senior secondary mathematics in many contexts, including Australia. In this article, I provide fresh insights into girls’ mathematics participation by employing a conceptualisation of gender as heteroglossic to explore the postcompulsory mathematics participation choices of two school students, one girl and one boy. Using these theoretical tools to decentre the students’ bodies, I demonstrate that the reasons why these students chose to participate in Mathematics Advanced do not distinguish them by their sex/gender, as would be expected in the monoglossic gender system. While femininity was performed, both students’ subject choices were primarily characterised as masculine performances, including establishing themselves as having mathematics brains and seeking to use their mathematics participation to attain prestige. I argue that recognising and normalising girls’ masculinity and boys' femininity, rather than simply categorising gender differences, will be essential to increasing girls’ belonging and participation in mathematics. This will require greater attention to the differences within, and similarities between, the categories of boy and girl. Keywords Gender . Mathematics . Participation . Secondary education . Subject choice
* Felicia Jaremus [email protected]
1
Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, Faculty of Education and Arts, School of Education, The University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia
F. Jaremus
Introduction While mathematics education research has become increasingly concerned with equity, including girls’ participation in the subject, the field remains troubled by how to conceptualise and operationalise gender. Indeed, with mathematics still hegemonically regarded as universal, apolitical, rational and therefore devoid of human influence (Gutiérrez 2013), researchers concerned with mathematics have rarely ‘crossed the boundary’ with feminist theory (Damarin 2008). As a result, there remains an ‘integral, if hidden, attachment to the concept of sex’ (Francis and Paechter 2015, p. 777) as a pre-discursive truth in mathematics education research. Indeed, despite feminist imperatives to ‘see’ gender performances beyond the body if we are to avoid essen
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