There are no fixed essences beneath language and power. What counts as real is produced, and kept in place, by discourse.
- +Fits Post-structuralist Epistemology, Feminist Epistemology
- –Tension with Positivist Epistemology, Critical Realist Epistemology
Key thinkers: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler
The longer story
Post-structuralist ontology says: look, you think there are stable things with fixed identities, but actually there's only difference and deferral. Derrida showed how meaning never arrives, always pointing elsewhere. Deleuze saw pure difference as primary. No foundations, no essences, no fixed categories—just endless play of signs and forces. Sounds nihilistic? It's actually liberating for certain questions. If you're studying how 'genius' got constructed, or how genre boundaries shift, or how identities are performed rather than possessed—post-structuralism gives you the tools. The stable thing you thought you were studying? It's actually a process of becoming-stable, always contested.