In Discipline and Punish (1977) Foucault identified a set of strategies by
which a discourse “constitutes its object”
(Foucault, 1972, p. 39).
These strategies normalize certain subjectivities and exclude others. Strategies
of normalization and exclusion may be recognized as comparing, ranking, classifying,
hierarchizing, and dividing (Foucault, 1977). I attend to these strategies in
the research questions with a particular focus on the ways in which discourse
strategies normalize middle-class mothering and literacy practices by excluding
identities and subjectivities that fall outside this norm. In this analysis,
I am influenced by the work of Gleason (1999) who documented the normalizing
strategies of psychology in Canadian family life, and by Cannella (1997), who
adopted Foucault’s genealogical approach to “problematize the notion
of ‘childhood’ as a pre-determined human condition, and to examine
how our constructions of the ‘child’ serve to limit and devalue
the multiple ways in which we may learn to know children”
(p. 24). Implicit
in the attention to discourse strategies is a concern for their effects upon
how we come to know our world and act within it.
The goal of the Foucauldian approach to critical discourse analysis undertaken in this study was to understand the discursive strategies that make statements such as “parents are their children’s first and most important educators” true, and to situate these statements within a broader social and historical context. It is thus important to consider who attains power through discourses associated with literacy advice and the implications of this power for the reproduction of gender inequality as well as inequality of educational opportunities for children, particularly with respect to literacy attainment. It is in the effects of discourse where power and knowledge come together that the critical element to the approach becomes most visible. Attending to the power effects of discourse involves asking: Who benefits from this discourse? Who is left out and what is forgotten? What are the effects of this? Foucault, as cited in Mills (1997), argued that discourses are not just instruments of power, but may also be effects of power.
Discourse is not only an instrument of regulation but a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and reproduces power, it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. (Foucault, 1978, cited in Mills, 1997)