It is in undertaking an analysis of the discourses of the strategies and effects of literacy advice that some of the work of thwarting these discourses is achieved. The main site of this work, however, is in the ways in which women, men, mothers and fathers, children, and educators mediate and resist these discourses. This is a core concern for post structural feminists who build on Foucault’s concepts of discourse and his problematization of the subject to illuminate the connections between gender, patriarchy, and inequality.
In his many historical investigations, Foucault did not foreground or directly
problematize gender relations or women’s experiences. Nevertheless, his
approaches to discourse have opened up areas for feminists to disturb the construct
of the “essential” woman and theorize subjectivities in ways that
reveal gender as a social construct. For example, as Fox (1996) argued, social
constructivism has emerged as a dominant approach to the study of motherhood.
This approach, in many ways influenced by Foucault’s concepts of discursive
structures and power/knowledge, assumes that images of the good mother are not
true but rather social constructions that are shaped by patriarchal relations
of power that naturalize these images across a variety of settings. However,
many feminist scholars, while recognizing the benefits of post-structural approaches
to their work, argue that the focus on relations of power in texts/discourse
obscures the material realities of women’s lives, and, ironically, can
be overly deterministic. As Mariana Valverde (1991) observed, “Acknowledging
the usefulness of discourse analysis and other literary forms of analysis for
probing social, political, and historical processes does not require us to conclude
that social and economic relations are created ex nihilo words”
(p.
35). Comacchio (2000) captured this critique from the perspective of historians
of the family:
There is a certain hint of determinism in over-focusing on what is constructed, perhaps taking away from the creativity of the subjects and that all-important agency to which social historians are committed. We would all do well to keep using these valuable tools of historical analysis — only not as one big Foucauldian hammer, applied as though everything were intrinsically meant to be hammered. (p. 218)