Abstract
Borders – territorial, political, economic, and ideological – are processes of social division. They monitor and exclude and are typically regulated, patrolled, maintained, and defended by an array of power regimes, but borderlands are also sites of movement, agency, and resistance. We draw 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. The goal in this chapter is to recognize and challenge salient borders around gender, sexuality, and other identity categories in mathematics education and to work toward opportunities for hybridity created by these borders and in the blurring or queering of them. We provide a review of literature documenting the extent to which sexist and heterosexist ideologies patrol, reinforce, and perpetuate borders in mathematics that often marginalize women and queer people. We conclude the chapter with recommendations around how to blur borders around gender and sexuality in mathematics pre-service teacher education.
Keywords
We deliberately listed authors in reverse alphabetical order, in a nod to our subject of queering, but this chapter represents the shared work of both authors.
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Notes
- 1.
It is impossible to separate gender and sexuality from race. We are concerned by how this analysis and discussion of gender and sexuality in an analysis seem to ignore race and how such an absence could be interpreted as a claim that race is somehow separate. We chose to focus this chapter on gender and sexuality, most of the time leaving matters of race unstated, but remind readers that gender and sexuality always intersect with race (see Joseph, Hailu, & Boston, 2017; Leyva, 2017).
- 2.
David Halperin (2003) credits Teresa de Lauretis with coining “queer theory” during a California conference because of its shock value. Lauretis intentionally builds on its origin as defamatory, intentionally, and “scandalously offensive” (Halperin, 2003, p. 340) to define “queer” as something that means to unsettle, disrupt, and transcend what has been socially and politically accepted as normative identity categories.
- 3.
We remind readers that systems of oppression around gender and sexuality intersect with and reinforce systems of oppression around race and class. Our choice in this chapter was to “telescope in” (Collins, 1990) on gender and sexuality, despite how these systems of oppression always intersect with race and class.
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Yeh, C., Rubel, L. (2020). Queering Mathematics: Disrupting Binary Oppositions in Mathematics Pre-service Teacher Education. In: Radakovic, N., Jao, L. (eds) Borders in Mathematics Pre-Service Teacher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44292-7_11
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