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In modern society,“power no longer relies on violence,but is increasingly generatedand exercised by discourses that construct meaning and shape understanding in the humanmind.”(Castells,2009)The first step for rulers to ultimately construct subjects that meetGilead requires destroying past discourses.“Discourses construct the whole of history,andit can be said that all human history and civilization,absurd or great,is constructed bydiscourses.History is a pile of documents,records,books,piled up by discourses,swingingaccording to the direction of power and discourse.”(Yang,2008)Therefore,to create athoroughly theocratic state,it is necessary to destroy the history and the discourse of the past and build the Gilead discourse based on the principles of the Bible in literalinterpretation.

1.1.1 The Destruction of the Discourse of the Past

Before the establishment of Gilead,America called for equality and freedom.Womenhad the right to demand equality to men,and after years of the feminist movement,finallyachieved equal status to men.Offred’s mother was a member of screaming slogans such as“FREEDOM TO CHOOSE.EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY.RECAPTURE OURBODIES.DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMAN’S PLACE IS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE?”(Atwood,2010:130)She with other women burned magazines that objectified women andrefused to become subservient to men.Beyond that,she had an avant-garde andindependent attitude towards marriage,believing that women could live on their owninstead of relying on men.

1.2 The Result of the Operation of Knowledge Discourseunder the Domination of Fundamentalism

Foucault’s Madness and Civilization(1988)analyses the discourse of psychiatry andhow official discourse perceives,classifies and distributes non-entity concepts such as“madness”and“rationality”in different epochs of western cultural history.His workdemonstrates that the distinction between madness and reason,between fact and fallacy,has always been determined by the discursive patterns that prevailed in the centers ofsocial power at different times.Suppose the power does not actively produce suchknowledge.In that case,power will not be able to achieve control over society throughmultiple power relations,and one cannot enforce power if it is not through the productionof true discourse(Foucault,1997).The subject studied by Foucault is no longer a rationalsubject in the sense of recent philosophy,but a subject that is forged and constructedthrough discourse experience,and its formation is a historical process of construction(Zhang,2016).The construction of the Gilead discourse confronts their population,originally under the free American discourse,with the subjects’plight.The subject’sexperience will face shocks and reshaping,including the reshaping of identity,madnessand reason,fact,and fallacy..

1.2.1 The New Cognition of Identity

Gilead redefines the identity of the subject through the operation of discourse.Unlikethe free American in the past,Gilead’s highest criterion for defining identity does not labelsuch as gender,age,occupation and class,but religi本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。