ABSTRACT
Our early work had established that issues of power and positioning were central to our account and had acknowledged the importance of fantasies and fictions in constructing the relation of masculinity and femininity to Mathematics performance. We had not taken very far, though, the idea that the discursive fictions of the natural create the subject positions for girls and boys, or that on entering these fictions they are measured against them, so that girls are always found wanting. In the chapters which follow we shall explore in more detail how this is accomplished — first, the discursive regulation of the teacher and the child as these position women and girls in primary classrooms.
