Discourse and “Truth”: The Production of the Relationships between Women, Men and Mathematics

• Main Authors: Maria Celeste Reis Fernandes de Souza, Maria da Conceição Ferreira Fonseca
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2009-01-01
• Series: Revista Estudos Feministas
• Subjects: Gênero; Matemática; Numeramento; Discurso; Educação de Pessoas Jovens e Adultas
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ref/article/view/12071

This work presents an analysis essay developed in a research which investigated the gender relations in numeracy practices of male and female students in Youth and Adult Education (EJA). As an attempt to understand how these relations – based on gender differences – are constituted by numeracy practices and, at the same time, how they constitute such practices, we adopt the gender concept as an analysis category, passing through Foucaultian theorizations related to discourse. Taking into consideration the contributions from Ethnomathematics, we point to the rationality of the Cartesian matrix as the producer of truths about women, men and mathematics. This article describes the utterance “Man is better in math than woman”, which was identified as a discourse maker of male superiority in mathematics.