SOCA01H3 Lecture Notes - Sodomy, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler
Document Summary
In the work of michel foucault, and that of the social theoreticians he inspired: discourse describes an entity of sequences, of signs, in that they are enouncements. An enouncement is not a unity of signs, but an abstract matter that enables signs to assign specific, repeatable relations to and among objects, subjects, and statements. Hence, a discourse is composed of sequences of such relations among objects, subjects, and other statements. The term discursive formation conceptually describes the regular communications that produce such discourses. As a philosopher, foucault applied the discursive formation in the analyses of large bodies of knowledge, such as political economy and natural history. In the history of sexuality, he argues that in the western world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people"s identities became increasingly tied to their sexuality. Development of sexuality as a coherent discourse, showing how modern understanding is in fact merely the latest repetition in a history of understanding.
