reality. In fact, I argue that our deeply engrained ways of categorizing,
portraying, understanding, and dismissing the poor white are more than
mere examples of a rigid and abiding stereotype. Instead, I submit that
this pervasive set of identity markers that infiltrate literature, popular
culture, everyday vocabulary, even scholarly writing, represents a group
of assumptions and beliefs so firmly entrenched and themselves invisible
that they are susceptible to Foucauldian discourse analysis. It is this
discursive taken-for-grantedness that allows someone like Jeff
Foxworthy to mine the redneck stereotype so successfully.
To invoke Foucault’s concept of discourse, as developed in such
works as Madness and Civilization, The Birth o f the Clinic, and The
History o f Sexuality, is to imagine the presence of a totalizing semiotic
system that makes certain truth statements possible and others
impossible. Such an approach recognizes that social, political, or sexual
categories are not natural and fixed but rather are constructed within a
specific cultural “space” that constitutes an ideological discourse, within
which the strictures o