Queering the Borders in Mathematics Teacher Education

• In Event: Exploring the Role of Borders in Mathematics Preservice Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper draws on Thomas Nail’s and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories about borders to elaborate on processes of social division around gender and sexuality in mathematics education. Borders—territorial, political, economic, ideological—are processes of social division (Nail, 2016), which are utilized towards control and exclusion, through processes of regulation, surveillance, and defense by an array of power regimes (Nail, 2016). Borderlands are spaces of movement, agency, and resistance (Anzaldúa, 1999).

Schools, as gendered with their own particular sets of regulated processes and regimes of truth about sex, gender, and sexuality (Foucault, 1990), tend to marginalize transgender or gender non-conforming youth (Mellor & Epstein, 2006; Miller, 2011). Mathematics, as a school discipline, has been employed as a border to support and further processes of social division that contain, protect, and maintain flows of access and opportunity, through what Louie (2017) has called its persistent and restrictive “culture of exclusion” (p. 489). Various social systems around mathematics, such as ability tracking or how mathematical ability is narrowly defined, are hallmarks of this restrictiveness and exclusion.

Framed by Anzaldúa’s and Nail’s ideas about borders, our paper provides a review of literature and documents the extent to which sexist and heterosexist ideologies patrol, reinforce and perpetuate borders in mathematics education and highlight the following claims: 1) Western mathematics support processes of social division around gender and sexuality through reliance on gendered and binary oppositions; 2) mathematics and identifying with mathematics requires identity work that serves as a site of struggle for those non-conforming with white or straight norms; and 3) blurring borders around gender and sexuality in mathematics education can create space for other kinds of logics in mathematics. The paper concludes with recommendations of instructional modules for mathematics teacher education about how to identify borders in mathematics education, possibilities for creating Borderland spaces by queering those borders, and implications for mathematics as a discipline.

Authors

• Cathery Yeh, Chapman University

• Laurie Rubel, Brooklyn College - CUNY