National Consultation 2018 on the Protection of Families. Critical Reflections on the Government’s “Consultation” (Part 2)

Abstract

The study is the second part of the paper published in TNTeF, December 2018. It examines and analyzes the questions included in the government’s document, “National Consultation 2018, Protecting Families”. It draws on the tools of discourse analysis within the theoretical framework of Michelle Foucault’s (1991, 2007) bio-power and biopolitics. Moreover, it deconstructs the government’s strategy of consultation as a form of “democratic participation”. The study sees the consultation itself and the formulation of the issues that the document contains as a technology of power for shaping citizens. These power technologies, which Foucault called truth regimes (Foucault 1991; 2007), are nowadays often described as “post-truth politics” (Mair 2017; Kalpokas 2018) or “the art of lying” (Rabin-Havt & Media Matters for America 2016) or truth wars (Lee 2015). Concerning the purposes of ideological manipulation, the document manufactures a process of social homogenization, transforming the citizenry into a “mass” framed within the “nation”, meant to replace and confine the unfolding demands for diversity and pluralism.