Introduction

For those modern institutions responsible or charged with alleviating or reducing poverty, discourses can be described as a “regulated system of statements” that establish differences between the poor and non-poor. In this regard, modern institutional discourses of poverty are discourses of power that produce “subjects who fit into, constitute and reproduce a social order” (Baker and Galasiński, 2001:13). Discourses of power are social technologies that are inseparable from the way modern institutions attempt to control populations through the governing of mentalities. Foucault refers to this mode of governing populations by modern institutions as “governmentality” (2001:13). It is through this way of governing that modern institutions regulate or “police” societies and subject populations to bureaucratic regimes and modes of discipline (2001:13). Discourses of “poverty” are therefore social technologies that link the production of knowledge about the “poor” with forms of institutional power and intervention that represent and produce “poor people.” More generally, discourses of power do not only represent populations of people, but also represent those populations in relation to categories of difference. To explain this further

let’s turn to gender discourses. In Technologies of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis explains that gender is not only a representation that refers to an object but is “a representation of a relation, that of belonging to a class, a group, a category” (1987:4). De Lauretis goes on to say that as a relation

[g]ender constructs a relation between one entity and other entities, which are previously constituted as a class, and that relation is one of belonging; thus gender assigns to one entity, say an individual, a position within a class, and therefore also a position vis-à-vis other preconstituted classes. […] So gender represents not an individual but a relation, and a social relation; in other words, it represents an individual for a class.