August 2023
Love, Gender and Mathematics
Love, Gender and Mathematics
Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2023. 'Love and Mathematics', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/august-2023
At the end of August 2023 I received the good news of the second paper of the project accepted in the journal Women's History Review: Reading letters of an eighteenth-century femme philosophe: love as an existential and creative force in Émilie Du Châtelet’s correspondence, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2023.2252224
My interest in and engagement with love in women's letters goes back a long way, to the days of my PhD, and throughout my research I have been writing about women ‘erasing their sexuality’ in their attempt to become teachers, (Tamboukou 2003), facing the dilemma of whether ‘to paint or to love’ in the process of being recognised as artists (2010), surviving the labour unions hierarchy in their struggles as workers, (2016) or even fleeing the heteropatriarchal assemblages as forcefully displaced subjects (2021). This long-term engagement with love in my overall project of writing feminist genealogies was consolidated in a book on Epistolary Narratives of Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics, that was only published in July 2023, but was actually researched for and eventually written, well before this project started [see Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics].
My interest in and engagement with love in women's letters goes back a long way, to the days of my PhD, and throughout my research I have been writing about women ‘erasing their sexuality’ in their attempt to become teachers, (Tamboukou 2003), facing the dilemma of whether ‘to paint or to love’ in the process of being recognised as artists (2010), surviving the labour unions hierarchy in their struggles as workers, (2016) or even fleeing the heteropatriarchal assemblages as forcefully displaced subjects (2021). This long-term engagement with love in my overall project of writing feminist genealogies was consolidated in a book on Epistolary Narratives of Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics, that was only published in July 2023, but was actually researched for and eventually written, well before this project started [see Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics].
My wider research interest and scholarly work in love, gender, and politics notwithstanding, I was surprised to see it emerging as a theme in this research project and I was even more surprised to find that there is a small but burgeoning body of literature on love and mathematics from a range of perspectives and disciplinary fields, including women in mathematics. (see Kochina 1985, Frenkel 2013)
I have to admit that the reviewers of the paper on love in Du Châtelet’s correspondence were uneasy with the theme, pointing out to the problematic overemphasis of Du Châtelet’s sexual liaisons in some strands of the previous literature, which downplayed her scientific contributions. While agreeing with the critique of such trends in the literature, my Arendtian approach to love as an existential and creative force highlights the importance of affects, emotions and passions in the field of gender, science and mathematics.
In this context, I have considered Du Châtelet’s epistolary archive as a repository of documents that trace the process of becoming a woman mathematician, philosopher and scientist-a femme philosophe par excellence of the European Enlightenment. Du Châtelet’s letters to a number of important mathematicians of her times have been read as ‘laboratory letters’, sites of experimentation, but also textual spaces for the creation, display and dissemination of mathematical, scientific and philosophical ideas and knowledge. Her personal letters and particularly her amorous correspondence with her last lover Jean François de Saint-Lambert have been read as discursive expressions of love, not just for the beloved/addressee but perhaps more importantly as a creative force of life encompassing Du Châtelet’s passion for study as a pathway to happiness. On the plane of epistolary analytics, that considers the form, the content and the context of letters in their complex interrelation, the personal and the scientific are therefore tightly interwoven in Du Châtelet’s epistolarium (Stanley 2004) through the creative forces of love.
I hope that my take on love in this project in general and in this paper in particular, will contribute to a wider engagement with affects and mathematics in both historical and contemporary research. (see for example Hannula et al., 2019)
In this context, I have considered Du Châtelet’s epistolary archive as a repository of documents that trace the process of becoming a woman mathematician, philosopher and scientist-a femme philosophe par excellence of the European Enlightenment. Du Châtelet’s letters to a number of important mathematicians of her times have been read as ‘laboratory letters’, sites of experimentation, but also textual spaces for the creation, display and dissemination of mathematical, scientific and philosophical ideas and knowledge. Her personal letters and particularly her amorous correspondence with her last lover Jean François de Saint-Lambert have been read as discursive expressions of love, not just for the beloved/addressee but perhaps more importantly as a creative force of life encompassing Du Châtelet’s passion for study as a pathway to happiness. On the plane of epistolary analytics, that considers the form, the content and the context of letters in their complex interrelation, the personal and the scientific are therefore tightly interwoven in Du Châtelet’s epistolarium (Stanley 2004) through the creative forces of love.
I hope that my take on love in this project in general and in this paper in particular, will contribute to a wider engagement with affects and mathematics in both historical and contemporary research. (see for example Hannula et al., 2019)
References
Frenkel, Edward, Love and Math, The Heart of Hidden Reality (New York: Basic Books, 2013)
Hannula, Markku S, Leder, Gilah C., Morselli, Francesca, Vollstedt, Maike, Zhang Qiaoping, eds. Affects and Mathematics Education: Fresh Perspectives on Motivation, Engagement and Identity, (Cham: Springer, 2019)
Kochina, Pelageya, Love and Mathematics: Sofia Kovalevskaya. Transl. Michael Burov. (Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1985)
Stanley, Liz, ‘The epistolarium: on theorising letters and correspondences’, Auto/Biography, 12, (2004): 216-50.
Tamboukou, Maria, Women, Education and the Self: a Foucauldian perspective. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).
Tamboukou, Maria, Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen John’s letters and paintings. (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).
Tamboukou, Maria, Gendering the Memory of Work: Women Workers’ Narratives. (London: Routledge, 2016).
Tamboukou, Maria, Revisiting the Nomadic Subject: Womens’ Experiences of Travelling Under Conditions of Forced Displacement. (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021).