Disciplining the feminine, the home and nature in three Australian public health discourses

Abstract

Within environmental studies, nature typically is conceived as an object out there, a pre-existing reality that we discover and know. Poststructural theorising about the production of knowledge as contingent and contextual has had very limited exposure in environmental studies, but its insights challenge the notion that nature is a priori and knowable. It is the purpose of this paper to examine poststructural concerns about the body, biopolitics, and governmentality, by focusing on the constitution of three categories of meaning - namely the feminine, the home and nature - in three Australian public health histories. The paper asserts that many communication devices - metaphor, metonymy, statement, text, and discourse - serve to conflate and reify these categories in highly problematic ways. Poststructural analysis may provide analytical avenues out of a morass of stereotyping generalisations about nature.