Introduction

According to Foucault, discourse and power are, ultimately, inseparable. For him, power is not confined to institutions or to the powerful, and does not act just to repress, but is multiple and productive and dispersed across a range of discursive sites. The concept of discourse, then, has been useful in generating new understandings about the individual-in-society and has illuminated the complexities of the dialectical processes whereby 'the social' both constrains and facilitates subjectivities and human action, at the same time as indicating how individual subjective engagements with discourse are, in important ways, unpredictable and creative. Helen Maison addresses the crucial question of research method. She provides a reflexive account of her empirical work on 'anorexic' subjectivities and scrutinises her discourse-analytic method with the benefit of hindsight. This chapter raises the important question of what it was that was driving the boys' performance.