In light of the contemporary discussions on the biased relationship between gender and mathematical teaching and learning in the Western world, can we, by means of a reconceptualised early childhood education, influence how young children construct their gendered subjectivities in relation to mathematics? This project has been carried out with the aim of challenging the taken-for-granted mathematical teaching discourse and to produce more creative, in-depth and gender-sensitive mathematical learning situations for teacher students and their subsequent students in Early Childhood Teacher Education practices. To exemplify such work, from a data-collection of 75 student reports, this article investigates and analyses documentation collected from a maths project undertaken by an ECE teacher student. The poststructural and material feminist analysis performed shows that the materialdiscursive intra-actions (Barad 2007) taking place are conceivable to have both expected and unexpected gendered impacts on children’s ongoing subjectivity constructions. It also shows that it is difficult but possible to change taken-for-granted mathematical teaching practice as well as teacher students' understandings of maths teaching.

In this study I have investigated how alternative ways of teaching mathematics influence and affect Early Childhood Education (ECE) students’ attitudes towards maths and how they understand their own subjectivities as more or less mathematical during a 10-week alternative maths course. The investigated course adopts a feminist post-structural approach based on critical pedagogy and deconstructive theory and includes an interdisciplinary approach to investigative mathematics. The data used include the memory/narrative writings and processwritings of 75 female teacher-education students, collected from three different cohorts, in which the students describe their learning processes throughout the maths course. The study shows that, in the main, the students became much more positively inclined to the subject of mathematics after the maths course and agreed that this course had changed their understanding of their own mathematical subjectivity, albeit in different and varying ways.

The aim of this article is to illustrate how the understanding of mathematical subjectivity changes when transiting theoretically from a discursive and performative thinking of subjectivity, as suggested by Judith Butler (1993, 1997, 1999/1990), to an agential realist thinking, inspired by Karen Barad’s theories (2007, 2008). To show this I have examined narrative memory stories about mathematics written by students participating in Teacher Education maths courses. I provide examples of such stories and present an indepth analysis of one such story. The first part of the analysis has been carried out using performative methodological strategies – in relation to Judith Butler’s theories – while the latter part of analysis has been performed with the aid of diffractive methodological thinking – in relation to Barad’s theoretical perspectives. When summarising the analysis, it becomes evident that power is not only produced through discourse when transiting from a discursive to an agential realist and material-discursive analysis. Rather, power is also produced in what emerges in the intra-activities in-between the material objects used in mathematical learning, the body, emotions and discourse,