SOC 603 Lecture 3: Sociology of Gender, Week 3

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 603
• Professor: nayrouz abu hatoum

Document Summary

Gender as a social and cultural construct (b) Through language there are different dialogues in different communities and institutions. It is not fluid or fixed, produced historically. Realistic fixed approach discourse: a theoretical term conceptualized by theorist michel foucault. He did not invent it but theorized it. A discourse is an institutionalized way of speak or writing about reality that defines what can be intelligibly thought and said or not about the world. For example, in the history of sexuality (1976), foucault argued that new discourses of sexuality (like medical) had fundamentally changed the way we think about desire, pleasure, and ourselves. In commonsense language discourse means: a coherent of rational body of speech, or writing. A discourse is a group of statements which provide a language for talking about or ways of representing , a particular kind of knowledge about a topic.