Numbers and Narratives - The gendered subject of higher education mathematics

The gendered subject of higher education mathematics

Bruna Letícia Nunes Viana, PhD candidate, Stockholm University, Sweden

The production of mathematical knowledge is seen as fundamental to technological and scientific advancement, with universities serving as key sites for this knowledge production in modern society. However, the underrepresentation of girls in higher education mathematics highlights how dominant discourses impose a regime of truth where mathematics is associated with (a specific type of) masculinity, counting girls out (Walkerdine, 1998). My PhD research investigates how gender is performed in higher education mathematics through various material-discursive configurations. From a feminist theoretical perspective, gender is not a stable identity but a series of performances (Butler, 1999, 2004) — repetitive actions stabilized through their repetition within institutions such as families, schools, and universities. To unpack how these performativities happen in mathematics programs, I designed a three-phase investigation involving eight mathematics undergraduate students, who experience the entanglement of higher education mathematics with other material-discursive practices while performing both gender and mathematics. Together with the students, we explore their pathways into the program and how professors, peers, textbooks, etc., and other material-discursive practices may produce (exclusionary) gendered norms. Scientific fiction is being used to foster students’ sensibility to notice different gendering processes throughout the investigation period. Special attention is given to how students' bodies and emotions are constrained or enabled within these mathematics programs and how the university's physical space (re)produces gendering processes. Preliminary findings will be presented at the symposium.

Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge.

Walkerdine, V. (1998). Counting girls out: girls and mathematics. Falmer Press.

The gendered subject of hgher education mathematics Numbers and Narratives Symposium May 12, 2025 The gendered subject of higher education mathematics Bruna Leticia Nunes Viana bruna.nunes@su.se RQ: How gender is performed in higher education mathematics through various material-discursive configurations? The Research terrain Gender

Afterthoughts

Drawing on Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performative, Viana showed how students’ experiences in mathematics are shaped by repeated institutional practices—in classrooms, texts, and everyday interactions. Gender and mathematics, she argued, are co-performed in ways that are often invisible but deeply consequential.

What stands out is Viana’s use of feminist and speculative methods, including science fiction, to explore how students feel and navigate these forces. Her work centers affect, embodiment, and imagination—not as peripheral, but as essential to understanding how mathematical subjectivity is formed.

This resonates with the Numbers and Narratives project’s focus on lived experience and narrative. Viana reminds us that challenging exclusion in mathematics demands more than better representation; it requires reimagining the very conditions under which knowledge is produced and inhabited.