A genealogical approach to critical discourse analysis begins with a concept
or issue of contemporary concern and traces it back through its various constructions
over time. As Gale (2001) explained, a genealogy is concerned with understanding
how a particular concept or belief comes to be perceived as a truth or a problem
in the first place (p. 385). Carabine (2001) went further in outlining the specific
concerns of genealogy: “[The method] describes the procedures, practices,
apparatuses and institutions involved in the production of discourses and knowledge,
and their power effects”
(Carabine, 2001, p. 276). As Cannella (1997)
described it, genealogy is both “a perspective and a method in which
knowledge is viewed as rooted in power relations”
(p. 18). The focus
of analysis in a genealogy is how power/knowledge link up to produce discourses,
rather than providing an exhaustive account of the progress of history as a
plan unfolding, or an account of what really happened. Similarly, the aim in
this study is not to provide an exhaustive account of the historical construction
of the mother-as-teacher-of literacy, but rather to generate more complex understandings
of the discursive relationships between mothering and literacy that can inform
and illuminate a critique of the class and gender inequalities embedded in contemporary
literacy advice to mothers. The concepts that follow here have proven useful
in achieving the aims of the study.
As Lemke (1995) pointed out, an essential feature of critical discourse analysis is a concern for connecting local events and processes to broader social relations. In Foucault’s work, the discursive formation provides this conceptual link. For Foucault, a discourse or discourse formation could be recognized by the regularity among seemingly unconnected groups of statements and the rules that govern this regularity. As he explained:
[W]henever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformation), we will say … that we are dealing with a discursive formation.… The conditions to which the elements of this division are subjected we shall call the rules of formation. (Foucault, 1972, p. 38)
Taking into consideration the ways in which Foucault’s ideas about discourse
shifted throughout his life, Mills (1997) summarized Foucault’s concept
of discourse as a “set of sanctioned statements that have institutional
force — a profound influence on how individuals act and think”
(Mills,
1997, p. 62). Thus, a discourse formation connects the text to the social by
connecting statements to broader world views as well as to other statements
within and across texts, time, and place. For example, the regularity of the
statement “[m]others are their children’s first and most important
educators,”
found across a broad range of texts, indicates a discursive
formation. How this discourse relates to other statements, and indeed other
mothering discourses (Griffith & Smith, 1993; 2005), and its continuities
and discontinuities within and across texts, is a key area of inquiry in this
study.