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Abstract
Many approaches have been taken to study gender (in)equities in mathematics education, including studies of students’ achievement on standardized tests, participation in postgraduate degrees and careers, participation in the classroom, and students and teachers’ mathematics identities. In this dissertation, I used Baxter (2003b)’s Feminist Poststructural Discourse Analysis (FPDA) to consider how broader societal discourses about who can do mathematics and what it means to do mathematics produce effects in a seventh-grade mathematics classroom. I found that the Conceptual/Procedural Discourse operated through several dichotomies, such as the math/pictures dichotomy, to produce participants as more or less mathematically capable. The Conceptual/Procedural discourse was gendered as some White male students were subject-ed into positions such as “Albert Einstein,” “math professor,” and “helper” when no other students were unable to achieve such a positioning, despite their participation in the same discursive practices. Additionally, I found the FPDA methodology to be useful for future mathematics education research to study gender equity through macro-level discourses operating in the localized spaces of mathematics classrooms. Future research should consider how the Conceptual/Procedural Discourse operates in a variety of classroom settings, the intersection of gendered and racialized discourse, and should consider what other discourses operate to produce students as more or less mathematical.