ABSTRACT
If we now build upon some of the ideas to emerge from the previous chapters, we can begin to see that discourses are embedded in power relations, and therefore have political effects. If our identities are not fixed and pre-given, but formed through the representations available to us in discourse, then why is it that some identities ‘stick’ to us and others are hard to ‘bring off’? The social constructionist view suggests that a large part of the answer to this lies in the fact that representations of people (e.g. as ‘free individuals’, as ‘masculine’ or as ‘well-educated’) can serve to support power inequalities between them, while passing off such inequalities as fair or somehow natural. Power can be thought of as the extent of a person’s access to sought-after resources, such as money, leisure time, rewarding jobs, and as the extent to which they have the capacity to have some effect on their world, for example by belonging to important decision-making bodies such as the cabinet, the judiciary or the board of directors of a big company, and therefore to have some impact upon other people’s lives. It is clear, then, that according to this definition some groups of people in society have less power than others. We can therefore say that (for example) the middle class has more power than the working class, that white people hold more power than black people, and that men are more powerful than women.
