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View submission: How is heteronormativity not "political"?
What does "discourse" mean here?
Comment by The_Ethics_Officer at 20/09/2024 at 21:40 UTC
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It's hard to summarize, but discourse for Foucault is meaning how we as a culture produce knowledge and meaning through language and systems (legal structures, power dynamics, science, etc.). Power is implicated in this as not all groups get an equal ability to form cultural meanings. The importance being here is that since all knowledge and meaning is constructed through discourse, it is *historical*. Meaning, it is not stable; it changes with culture and time.
Heteronormativity is discursively constructed through legal structures, media representation, daily communication, etc. in a way that makes it seem like the natural state of being. The acknowledgement that it is constructed through discourse is revealing that it is historical and therefore not objectively "correct" or "true." For Foucault, Butler, and anyone else rooted in post-structuralism, all ideas of gender, sexuality, etc. are historical.