A Review of Mathematics and the Body: Material Entanglements in the Classroom
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In Mathematics and the Body: Material Entanglements in the Classroom, Elizabeth de Freitas and Nathalie Sinclair present an approach to embodiment that they term inclusive materialism. Their aim is to radically disrupt notions of “the body,” primarily by decentering the body in accordance with an ontology categorizing physical matter, mathematical concepts, diagrams, sounds, gestures, and technological entities as an assemblage of “entanglements” constituting mathematical activity. Their perspective is explicitly influenced by feminist, queer, and critical race philosophies, which they channel to redefine what is considered human, to redraw the boundaries of what has historically been described as material and embodied, and to “rescue the body, so to speak, from a theory of discourse that denies its materiality in order to grant the body some measure of agency and power in the making of subjectivity” (p. 40).
