The specific locus of interest in feminist poststructuralism is in language as a site for the construction and contestation of social meanings. Feminist poststructuralists believe that language (which includes visuals) provides the means for people to think, speak and give meaning to the world around them (Weedon, 1987, p. 12). Through language, people internalise social norms and social perceptions of reality, thereby becoming members of society. It is through language that gender is socially constructed, as gender differences dwell in semantics. Through language, the individual makes sense of social and cultural experiences and provides informative explanations of those experiences (Baxter, 2002; Wetherell, 1999).
When viewed as more than vocabulary and grammatical rules, language, becomes the way we construct meaning and understanding of our world (Scott, 1988). Feminist poststructuralism challenges gender categories as dual, oppositional and fixed, arguing that gender comprises shifting, fluid, multiple categories. Hence, stable definitions of gender are challenged (Aikman
& Unterhalter, 2005). Feminist poststructuralism seeks to explain the emergence, becoming or genesis of structures, or how systems such as language come into being, mutate through time
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and give meaning to the world of a particular gender. Such systems are therefore neither fixed nor stable (Deleuze, 1988). As a common factor in any analysis of power, social meanings and construction of identities, language must be a central site of analysis. This is where actual and possible forms of social organisation and their social and political consequences are defined and contested. Crucially, language is where subjectivity – which feminist poststructuralism sees as a site of disunity and conflict – is constructed (Weedon, 1997).
Thus, a feminist poststructural lens provides an understanding of the way patriarchal power is maintained through knowledge and language, both of which are inextricably linked.
Knowledge is created through the use of language and discourses generated by institutions of power, which privilege certain groups over others (Kirby, 2006). This perspective argues that people in positions of power have maintained their structures of dominance through producing the discourses, and thereby the knowledge, which are then used to influence public perception and understanding of gender relations. This process of discourse and knowledge production will be investigated to see whether it prevails in the case of Business Studies textbooks.
The act of writing is essentially a selection process. Writers decide what is included and what is excluded, what to make explicit or leave implicit, what is foregrounded and what is backgrounded, what is thematised and what is unthematised, what process types and categories will be used to represent events, characters and so on (Fairclough, 1995). Moreover, when the writer speaks or writes, a particular worldview is always taken (Gee, 1999, p. 2). People can be informed and controlled by language and, in turn, inform and control others. There is no neutral discourse because every word that is said or written about the world is articulated from a particular ideological position (Fowler, 1991). This clearly includes ideological positions about gender; therefore, no representations in the written and visual media are gender neutral (Weedon, 1997). They either confirm or challenge the status quo through the ways they construct or fail to construct images of femininity and masculinity.
Derrida’s (1981), Foucault’s (1981) and Butler’s (1990) theoretical perspective on language and discourse will be used in this study, as it provides a useful analytical tool with which to deconstruct the language of textbooks and expose gender and other constructs embedded in the discourse. The act of deconstructing texts reveals the constant performance of the different elements within language, and means interpreting a text by exposing what is usually suppressed.
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Derridean deconstruction challenges binary systems, not by replacing unitary meaning with another, but by transforming terms to make visible their multiple meanings. These binary oppositions are subjective and constantly changing; they will eventually overlap and begin to contradict one another. Thus, the meanings of words are not in the words themselves, but in the differences between them. Hence, language is essentially a system of differences. Two terms cannot exist without reference to each other; therefore, meaning in language differs continuously in relation to other meanings. This phenomenon is termed différence (Derrida, 1981) and has already been highlighted in the literature review in discussion on representations of gender, race and disability in school textbooks.
The concept of différence is useful for this study as it disrupts binary thinking and offers a way of thinking about sexual difference that does not deny differences but does not create false hierarchies (Derrida, 1981). This binariness is seen in constructions like the term ‘woman’, which is trapped inside the metaphysics of presence and whose definition is only possible with reference to ‘man’. Derrida’s view is that “within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be” (1981, p. 33).
The model that I use maintains that women are equal to men, have the same status and identity as men, but are different from them. Thus, the word ‘woman’ needs to be deconstructed from a subordinate association and reconstructed through proving that women do not need to be rationalised by male dominance. Deconstruction allows one to see that a word’s meaning also shifts over time and place; it is highly context-dependent. Thus, deconstruction seeks to expose and then subvert the various binary oppositions that undergird dominant ways of thinking – presence/absence, speech/writing, and so forth. Derrida (1988, p. 32) maintains:
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
According to this thinking, every reading – no matter how subtle, sensitive or ironic – will have a trace of a different interpretation. This, as Derrida writes, is the power of a text. This view is useful for this study as it concerns itself not only with the way texts are constructed, but also with the way in which they are read. Meanings in texts are not fixed but are individual
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reinterpretations every time a text is read. It is therefore vital to expose the representations of power and dominance in texts for the benefit of school readers.
Poststructuralism completely disrupts the notion that meaning can always be known: “We can never know exactly what something means – we can never get to the bottom of things” and
“neither language nor philosophy can ever be the same” (St Pierre, 2000, pp. 481-482). Once it is seen how language is used to create reality rather than merely reflect it, greater possibilities for change are opened up. When language becomes a focus, we can investigate ways in which classroom language shapes not only how a discipline is represented, but also how it facilitates/limits the ways individuals make sense of their lives. Language is social and truly, as Weedon (1997, p. 23) states, “a site of political struggle”. Hence, a major concern for critical analysts is to demystify how texts can be representations of ideologies and contribute to social relations of power and domination.