CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.4. Poststructuralism
practice of Mathematics in the specific context of an independent middle to upper-middle class school in Durban.
Poststructuralist approaches are very different from those based on sex-role socialisation:
Postructuralist theory argues that people are not socialised into the social world, but that they go through a process of subjectification. In socialisation theory, the focus is on the process of shaping the individual that is undertaken by others. In post structuralist theory, the focus is on the way each person actively takes up the discourses through which they and others speak/write the world into existence as if it were their own. (Davies, 1994, p. 13)
Lee (1992) writes that a poststructural feminist analysis can expose the historical and contemporary oppressions of women of all races both in organisations and societies through daily interactions that lead to the creation of multiple identities based on gender, social class, sexuality and race. Poststructural feminism focusses on how people actively negotiate, construct and contest gendered identities in everyday actions. It assumes that individuals are active agents, not only as people who attach meaning to their actions, but also in a very fundamental sense as people who construct their very identities as boy/girl.
If one takes a poststructuralist view of gender, we can see that “masculinity and femininity are discourses which are imbued with power/knowledge relations and act upon individuals within particular societies” (Paechter, 2001b, p. 48). What this means is that how individual males and females behave involves an enactment of their gender roles, as interpreted by them in their social context and as constrained by the experiences of their bodies. We are all constantly and actively engaged in the social work of doing gender but our choices within this are “severely constrained by oppositional ways of thinking”
(Mendick, 2006, p. 24). Drawing on poststructural theory helps me to interrogate gender, particularly the gender identity and gender role behaviour of each of the six girls in this study as they go about constructing their relationship to the learning area of Mathematics.
Using a poststructural lens equips me to consider how “discourses of Mathematics,
masculinity and femininity are constructed and maintained, and how they are supported by
power/knowledge relations” (Paechter, 2001b, p. 48). It is within and around these discourses that the girls in this study actively engage in producing and reproducing their identities and relationships.
Poststructuralism is valuable for this educational research on girls and Mathematics for a number of reasons. They include the fact that the girls in this study are not
autonomous, unified wholes, separate or distinct from those discourses which regulate mathematics, femininity, sexuality and all other social activity. The girls in this study are identified and identify themselves according to the positions that they occupy within these discourses. At this point however, it is important to consider that the girls in this study have social and economic capital and therefore it is not simply about discourses, but also about how these girls use these discourses which are contextually specific around issues of race, class and gender.
The inter-relatedness of race, class and gender becomes vitally important when researching gender and mathematics in a South African context. Researchers working in the South African context make it explicitly clear that race and class play a specific role in the relationship between gender identity and mathematics (Bhana, 2005; Wolpe et al., 1997). Bhana (2002, p. 22) writes that “how people work on their identities and how identities are worked upon is a key concern of cultural studies. The question in cultural studies is: how are processes produced and circulated within material, social and cultural conditions which impact on the production of identity?”. Issues of race, class, gender and sexuality that constitute cultural dynamics are significant. It is important to recognize the social locations and material realities as they impact on identity and create the conditions for power relations (Epstein & Johnson, 1998). Within specific circumstances, race and class impact on identity in different ways. Identity is produced in everyday schooling contexts which help shape and reshape these wider structures of inequalities.
Poststructuralism takes social complexity seriously and attempts to work with it rather than reduce and marginalize it. This provides me with the opportunity to explore the
“daily struggle and muddle” (Lee, 1992, p. 7) that these girls experience whilst developing an association with mathematics. Finally, poststructuralism theorises the power and provides a productive way for me to account for the ways in which power operates on both the micro as well as the macro-level and, as something that is implicated in and through all the actions of these girls. As a social practice, education is vitally concerned with
understanding the production of meaning and the negotiation of social relations and relations of power. It provides a better way than other theories of understanding what it means to be a girl engaged in the project of Mathematics in a contemporary Catholic independent and coeducational school.
According to Davies (1994), within poststructural thought, all pedagogic work is identity work. School Mathematics operates as a discourse and its discursive practices position girls as either able or not able to act in powerful ways. The social context of the classroom is not separated from the individual as was thought to be the case in theories of socialisation, but is in or constitutive of the learner. “To the extent that discursive practices shape or make real certain ways of being, they are constitutive of the persons who take them up as their ways of speaking the world and themselves into existence” (1994, p. 44).
Conceptually, the notion of individual ability is replaced with a focus on the ways in which girls are produced within the discursive practices of Mathematics, recognising that there are many other family and public discourses that also influence identity formation.
Davies (1994) continues that as girls engage in the discursive events of the classroom, and they attempt to learn Mathematics, they come to know themselves as legitimate participants or not in the social practice of Mathematics education. “This coming to know is not a cognitive, conscious event, but rather an unconscious sense of whether or not their voice and presence in the discourses are valued” (p.42). Walkerdine (1990) reminds us that an individual can become powerful or powerless depending on the terms in which her subjectivity is constituted.
The aim in this section has been to introduce some of the key aspects of
poststructuralism that have provided a valuable theoretical tool in understanding the girls in
this study on Mathematics and gender. These key aspects formed the basis of my analyses in the remaining chapters. In taking a poststructural view, in which discourse is a central tenet, it becomes important to take into account that it is within a range of discourses of Mathematics, femininities, sexuality, masculinities and schooling that each of the six girls’
educational experiences come into being. Therefore, I view the problem of gender and Mathematics as not being located in the girls themselves, but rather in the discursive context of gender, Mathematics, sexuality and schooling around which they construct their identities.
2.4.1. Power, subjectivities and identity
The girls in this study are positioned within a range of discourses of Mathematics, femininity, schooling and sexuality and it is within these discourses that their experiences are constituted. These experiences are important in shaping identities that are relational and shot through with power. These discourses position them within networks of power, and discipline them into certain ways of being and acting and create within them a certain relationship to self. This power inhabits each girl, shaping her from the inside as well as the outside. Power is inscribed in our ways of being and in the spaces we inhabit. Power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared. Nor is it something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points (Foucault, 1976).
Foucault (1980) maintains that power is productive and not merely coercive, that is, it constructs subjectivities or identities. Power is exercised locally and that is also where it is resisted. Mendick (2004) argues that the Foucauldian idea that wherever there is power there is also resistance, is important because it captures the double-edgedness of power.
For the girls in this study, this means that they are positioned within networks of power that exist within the school, families, the mathematics classes and other social groups that disciplines them into certain ways of being and acting. However, they have agency and actively choose which positions they take up and which they resist.
Using a poststructural framework, I acknowledge that identity is actively constructed as people interact. They do not do so in linear ways but engage with social
circumstances to produce and reproduce identities. In this study, it is productive for me to read the construction of each girl’s identity as a verb rather than a noun. It is something that they do, and are done by, not something that they are. It is the product not the source of their actions. In this thesis, I see the identities of the girls as fluid, contradictory,
transforming, and relational. Who they are is always in a process of formation and is never complete. And throughout this process, our notions of who we are always narrated,
Identity is always within representation. Identity is not something which is formed outside and then we tell stories about it. It is that which is narrated in one’s own self (Walshaw, 2001, p. 7).
Identity is not fixed, absolute or pre-given, but according to Hall (1990), is a product of historically specific practices of social regulation which is in continual
construction and reconstruction. The identities of the girls in this study shift and fragment across “discourses, practices and positions” (Hall, 1990, p. 4) and are constantly in the process of change and transformation, always in process and never entirely complete.
Castells (1997) argues that the girls in this study are located in myriad power relations at the micro level of society, and in a complex web of discourses that offers them many ways of seeing and being. They have the agency to draw on these consciously and unconsciously, and in differing ways take up or reject the positions offered to them. Each one of the six girls in this study distinguishes herself from others, and in relation with others. In this thesis, I argue that the identity construction of each girl is a “dynamic process grounded in history, and desire, subjected to description and reflection and constantly presented to and negotiated with other people” (Hall, 1990, p. 4). Walker (2001) writes that because of inner diversity and a self that is fractured, contradictory and shifting, the narratives presented by [the girls in this study to me] often were and will be fraught with
contradictions. Walshaw (2001, p. 482) proposes that “colliding, contradictory discourses produce fractured and fragmented subjectivities for [these six girls in this study], and subjectivities that traffic in conflict tell tangled stories of female subjectivity in the mathematics classroom”. Each one of the girls had an individual story to share, often fraught with contradictions and uncertainty, of the ways in which they negotiated, accepted
and rejected the various positions available to them whilst actively engaging with mathematics.