In this study I employ Lacanian psychoanalysis and ideological criticism to analyze the development of "gender and mathematics" research over the past fifty years. This study is motivated by the original Marxist-Lacanian claim by Valerie Walkerdine in the 1980s that women's relationship with mathematics must always be considered as fundamentally problematic, and by the complex and often contradictory claims that are made in research artifacts that report on this topic. Many approaches to this topic that focus on "closing the gender gap" or aiming for "gender equity" warrant an ideological critique to situate these motivations within the political realm of mathematics education research. Artifacts analyzed in this study were gleaned from a comprehensive electronic library search of over 600 entries, where 178 were retained as yield. A complete ideological critique was performed on a subset of these. Findings include (1) historical alignment of the ideologies evidenced in the research with the ideological influences of the political situation at the time of publication, including scientism, neoliberalism, evolutionism, and solutionism, (2) the ideology of interpellationism which indicates the role of scientific ways of knowing in capitalist political economy, and (3) theoretical foundations of what I call the feminine-quilted-speech indicate how at the present moment in the field, we have the opportunity to shift the ideological underpinnings of research on gender and mathematics. The study avows the role of gender as an agent of capitalist accumulation in school mathematics, through a notion I develop called the masculine-quilted-speech. / Doctor of Philosophy / "Gender and mathematics" is a concern for mathematics education researchers that is old as the field itself, yet it is one that continues to be an active focus for a large swath of researchers. Conundrums abound. Such research includes, for example, neurotic obsessions and phantasies about closing achievement gaps between males and females, whilst other approaches consider the social factors impacting women's and men's relationship to mathematics. I wager that one reason for this plurality of approaches (and the incommensurability of their constituent findings and results) is the inability of existing theoretical perspectives for getting to the root of the problem (the point-de-capiton of the discourse). This dissertation offers a political psychoanalytic counter-perspective to prevailing theoretical approaches on the issue of "gender and mathematics" that critiques the ideologies advanced by researchers in the field through their actions of performing and publishing research on this topic. Findings indicate the extent to which ideology structures the actions of researchers, and the role of gender in the capitalist mode of school mathematics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/116286 |
| Date | 14 September 2023 |
| Creators | Moore, Alexander Stone |
| Contributors | Education, Vocational-Technical, Wilkins, Jesse L., Weaver-Hightower, Marcus Bennett, Pais, Alexandre, Johnson, Estrella, Norton, Anderson Hassell |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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