Maria vai com as outras? a construção de subjetividades a partir da figura feminina no livros didáticos de matemática

Abstract

Violence is the language through which social practices of domination have historically and culturally expressed themselves in relation to women. In the most diverse contexts and from an early age, women are subordinated and devalued on a daily basis. Even within the school institution whose didactic-pedagogical apparatus is a contribution to the exercise of a mutilated female citizenship. Meanwhile, our female students are forced to choose between their femininity and their intellect, they do not find possibilities of projection in careers in the so-called exact sciences and are continually discouraged from being brilliant. Meanwhile, textbooks, especially mathematics ones, continue to (re)produce gender addresses, convey ideologies of domination and mobilize multiple erasures. Faced with this chaotic scenario of rooted prejudices and suspension of rights I seek to reflect on the question: What can we discuss from the mathematics textbook about what it means "to be a woman"? The aim of this qualitative study with a Foucauldian post-structuralist bias and a feminist perspective is to reflect on female representations in mathematics textbooks. At first, I identify the gender representations found in this artifact through national and international research on the subject. Then, in the context of the Cycle of Workshops “Does Maria go with others? The construction of subjectivities from the female figure in mathematics textbooks”, I analyze the discourses that emerge in the speeches of undergraduate female students and teachers of basic education when perceiving such representations. Still, I take the discussions woven in the meetings and the final productions of the Workshop, which propose other possibilities for female representation in mathematics textbooks, as analysis materials. The results wander between denouncements and announcements. They reflect on a textbook whose portrayed Marias are diverse and powerful, so that our female students can project themselves into other spaces, expand their discursive limits and their fields of self production. In particular, as people who dominate and produce mathematics.