November 2001, Vol. 32, Issue 5
A Foucauldian Gaze on Gender Research: What Do You Do When Confronted With the Tunnel at the End of the Light?
Margaret Walshaw
This article, the focus of which is on girls in mathematics, engages poststructural debates over knowledge and power to explore how female subjectivity is lived within the classroom, and the first section looks at some recent feminist reconstructionists'
proposals developed from the idea of "different experience." The second section is set within the context of the poststructuralists' undermining of the "light" of progressive development, central to the Enlightenment project. Foucauldian ideas are introduced
for a theoretical discussion about the ways in which the girl becomes gendered through available discourses and practices. Building on this discussion, the third
section provides an analysis of some moments of classroom life and offers a different story about girls in school mathematics.
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