Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 147the book shows how individuals’ sexual self-understanding is, in large part,assigned to them by the discourses of sexuality current at any one momentin time.These discourses offer people a limited range of ‘subject positions’that they can inhabit – like straight, gay or bisexual. People are ‘recruited’into these positions rather than choosing them for themselves. What ismore, Foucault, argued, these subject positions are always already judgementaland prescriptive.Thus, those individuals who consider themselvesto be heterosexual are regarded (and regard themselves) as ‘normal’, whilepeople who are labelled ‘homosexual’ have, historically, carried the burdenof being classified as ‘abnormal’,‘deviant’ and even ‘perverse’ (see Box 3.3).In terms of bodily practices, Foucault showed that discourses of sexualitywere not only internalised mentality. More than this, they become practiseddiscourses because individuals come to regulate their sexual habits inaccordance with these discourses.These habits become ‘routinised’ throughrepetition throughout a person’s life-course.As Foucault (1979: 105) putit,‘Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which powertries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge triesgradually to uncover’ (see Segal 1997 for more on the different ways thatsexuality has been understood in Western societies).For Foucault, then, discourses of sexuality and much else besides ‘takehold’ of people’s identity and their bodily comportment. He saw subjectivityand corporeality as malleable across time and space – as enmeshedin well-established discourses that are propagated through major institutionssuch as schools, prisons and hospitals.Though in his later workhe explored how resistance to discourse might work, in much of his writingFoucault saw discourse and power as coterminous. After all, if peoplecannot find a space outside of discourse then they can only think andbehave in ways that are already established for them (not by them). Power is thusnot, for Foucault, something that emanates from, or is held, by key societalinstitutions (like the state). Rather, it emanates through them in a ‘capillary’fashion as multiple discourses do their daily work on people’s mindsand bodies. Power is thus ‘productive’ in much of Foucault’s theorising: itcreates the kinds of conforming identities and modes of behaviour that arecommensurate with dominant discourses.This summary of Foucault’s ideas is inevitably inadequate. But it isdetailed enough to make the link with several geographers’ research intopeople’s subjectivity and bodily action.Though Foucault never wrote aboutnature in the formal sense, the concept of nature and many of its collateral