ABSTRACT
The focus of Foucault’s work is discourse-the structured ways of knowing which are both produced in, and the shapers of, culture. Discourses are not merely linguistic phenomena, but are always shot through with power and are institutionalised as practices. So, for example, medical discourse is not simply a set of terms or signifiers but also includes the power that the doctor’s presentation of the situation bears in relation to that of the patient, as well as the institutional patterning of medical care.2 It is, in part, this recasting
of the focus of historical understanding which plants Foucault within a developing postmodernist tradition of thought, and it is a move that might be felt to resonate with feminists’ concern to study the ways that ‘femininity’ has historically been constituted.
