Introduction

Emerging scholarship in health communication attends to the discursive nature of health-care processes and messages (Lupton, 2003). Lupton defines discourse as a “patterned system of texts, messages, talk, dialogue or conversation which can both be identified in and located in social structures” (p. 142). Inherent in this description of discourse is the recognition of a patterned configuration that is rendered meaningful through a certain structural arrangement of statements. Thus, we can understand relationships between micro-level discourses as talk-in-interaction, and macro-level social discourses. Worth noting here is that discourse both constructs and is constructed by the contexts in which it is articulated. Building on this contextually situated nature of discourse, Foucault (1979, 1990) emphasizes that discourse is historic, and suggests that a discourse is a cluster of statements that define and simultaneously constrain the ways in which a particular phenomenon gets talked about, interpreted, and circulated at a particular historical moment. It is by attending to this historical moment that we come to understand the organizing role of discourse that puts forth a dominant set of meaning configurations that are aligned with the specific context. The historically situated nature of discourse was eloquently articulated in the writing of Foucault in classics such as Madness and Civilization (1967), The Birth of the Clinic (1975), and The History of Sexuality Volumes 1-3 (1979, 1986, 1988) that pointed out the ways in which historically situated networks of power constituted medical knowledges, practices, and experiences.