Abstract:
In this text, I present Jürgen Habermas's Discursive Ethics with a potential to diagnose political discourses that express gender relations and issues. Therefore, in structural terms, after a brief introduction that justifies Habermas's adaptation to the feminist debate, there follow an explanation of his philosophical project, and a section that deals with a historical condition of women in Brazil that, revealing exclusion from the linguistic community, illustrates the non-ownership of rights to a world of life and intersubjective sharing in public sphere spaces. Finally, based on a survey into the files of the Federal Senate, which narrate the episode of the enactment of the Law on “schools of first letters”, I discuss the androcentric ideas in force in parliamentary debates on mathematics curricula for boys and girls, and I also shed light into the ethics employed in the discourses that, while subjugating women, determined and delimited the learning and teaching of mathematics in the 19th century.
Keywords:
Mathematics teaching; Curriculum; Gender and sexuality; Androcentrism; Theory of communicative action; Women’s rights