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2 The Visual-Material Spectrum

To understand the study of visual-material rhetorics as a sustainable project of inquiry that can provide a window into the larger consequences that these artifacts have in the world means uncovering an analytical approach that can account more explicitly for the ways in which visual-material artifacts and particular spaces can shape or influence the practices of the contextualized body. In other words, visual-material rhetorics must account not only for the cultural work of the spatially-situated artifact but also specifically for its impact on the embodied subject. To understand rhetoric as embodied is to explore rhetorical practice as it manifests through the action of the body, or “to follow the expressive ebb and flow of expressive energy through human bodily activities: through gesture, through contact with and manipulation of objects, through movement and space” (Marback 62). This chapter not only takes a closer look at conversations focused more explicitly on the idea of embodiment and material rhetorics but also sees Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as appropriately situated when considered among them. Subsequently, I contend that the theories of Blair and Foucault can function symbiotically to allow for a more nuanced and embodied understanding of visual-material rhetorics as a mode of inquiry.

A Brief Note about Turns and Spectrums

As we begin to consider the relationship between visual and material rhetorics, it would seem plausible to question the need for a “material turn” within visual rhetoric. On the one hand, to consider the relationship of material rhetoric to visual rhetoric as constituting a “turn” seems almost obligatory, given the tendency of the humanities and social sciences to mark new conversations and disciplinary foci as such. On the other hand, to consider the notion of a “material turn” is to potentially misrepresent what I contend is a more integrated, already existing relationship between the visual and the material. W.J.T. Mitchell’s “pictorial turn,” 1 for example, helps us understand that it is possible to view a potentially increased focus on material rhetorics not as a full turn, per se, but rather as an already present component of visual rhetoric. For Mitchell, embodied knowledge and materiality are implicitly accounted for in the pictorial turn and its attendant modes of visual practice. He notes that however the pictorial turn may be defined, it is fundamentally a “postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” (16). Here, he describes the picture not as an artifact in and of itself but rather as implicated in broader cultural, relational, and physical contexts.

The analysis of photo 22727 in chapter one, for example, described the iconic image as situated in the discourses of the emerging environmental movement of the United States in the 1970s. When understood in light of the whole-earth discourse, the image may be read as prompting a more embodied experience that fosters a sense of personal responsibility toward the earth. To understand artifacts of visual rhetoric and cartographic representation as implicated in the pictorial turn is to view them as fostering embodied knowledge, as inviting a more intimate understanding of or connection to a particular place. We may see, then, that Mitchell’s acknowledgement of these interactions may indeed be read as accounting for materiality and embodied knowledge as a component of the visual—as part of the shift that already constitutes the pictorial turn. When understood in this light, the inclusive nature of Mitchell’s pictorial turn provides a useful starting point for envisioning the movement between the visual and the material as happening along a spectrum. I argue that to understand the relationship between the visual and material as such allows for a more inclusive mode of knowing that opens up rather than closes off interpretive possibilities—that accounts more readily for the movement between these modes and their interplay, such that we may more directly engage in the study of visual-material rhetorics as embodied knowledge and a sustainable project of inquiry.

Materiality, Space, and the Body

As described briefly in the introduction, a theory of material rhetoric, as conceptualized most clearly in Carole Blair’s 1999 study of five U.S. memorial sites, has at its core a focus on the impact of spatially-situated texts on contextualized, bodily experience. A closer look at recent work related to material rhetoric reveals that studies in this area may be understood as situated along a continuum. At one end of this continuum are analyses with a primary focus on physical space and a subsequent focus on the impact of those spaces on the bodies residing within them; at the other end of the continuum are analyses with a focus on the body first and foremost, and a secondary, contextualizing focus on the sociocultural contexts which make possible such analyses of the body. And of course, there are those analyses that are situated not along one end or the other, but someplace in the middle. In this chapter, I examine recent conversations explicitly related to studies of material rhetoric; included among them are the theories of Blair and Foucault, which I see as an integral component of any discussion and subsequent theory of visual-material rhetorics.

The earlier work of Carole Blair contains visible hints of what would later become the theory of material rhetoric set forth in her essay “U.S. Memorial Sites.” In an earlier essay, for example, Blair and her co-authors, Jeppeson and Pucci, describe the rhetorical impact of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, suggesting that its visibility has been enhanced through its reproduction in popular culture—ideas that then receive further treatment in “U.S. Memorial Sites” (“Public Memorializing” 263). While Blair and her co-authors do not yet use the term “material rhetoric,” their criteria for postmodern architecture are not incompatible with the goals of a material rhetoric. These criteria primarily focus on a memorial’s “melding of incompatible symbols, forms, styles, and textures within a particular structure,” and its integration of regional or historical characteristics and forms (267). Deborah Fausch takes further the idea of a postmodern architecture, forwarding the idea of a feminist architecture that is quite similar to how we might understand material rhetoric. An architect herself, Fausch feels that feminist architecture may be designated as such “if it fostered an awareness of and posited a value to the experience of the concrete, the sensual, the bodily—if it used the body as a necessary instrument in absorbing the content of the experience” (42). This idea too is compatible with the general goals of Blair’s later theory of material rhetoric, as outlined in the essay “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites,” in which she understands the action of the body as a necessary component in absorbing even a portion of a site’s meaning.

As described in the Introduction, L.J. Nicoletti incorporates what may be read as a Blairian framework in her creation of an assignment geared toward helping her first-year writing students cope with the events of September 11th and respond to the types of memorialization they were witnessing in the mass media. Again, while this is not necessarily a book about public memory, Nicoletti aptly points out that to uncover the arguments built into commemorative sculptures or monuments may also make us more attuned to the ideological agendas often perpetuated through particular renderings or portrayals of politicized events (53). Similarly, Barbara Biesecker writes that “claiming and representing the past is far from being an innocent affair” (“Remembering” 168). As Biesecker’s important analysis of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial (WIMS) demonstrates, a memorial’s ostensible goals may differ from its more subtle rhetorical work. On the surface, for example, the WIMS appeared to acknowledge the millions of women who have served in the U.S. military since the Revolutionary War (Biesecker 165). As a critical analysis of the memorial reveals, however, the memorial’s revisionist history served to alienate the women whom it was intended to valorize. Within the WIMS, an exhibit gallery that should have promoted the accomplishments of individual women soldiers functions more generally to “mark the regular rhythms and daily practices of our nation’s service women” (166). As a result, she writes, “typicality rather than rarity subtends the order of things” (166). Consequently, these artifacts have the effect of problematically implying a representative, universalizing narrative, perpetuating a “seemingly complete, unabridged history of women in the U.S. armed services” (166). Instead, Biesecker calls for something akin to a multimodal rhetorical approach characterized more so by its ability to foster embodied knowledge. A material rhetoric approach indeed makes room for the contextualized nuances of multimodal, embodied experience that influence the cultural moments in which we interact with rhetorical artifacts.

Barbara Dickson and Dan Brouwer each consider the ways in which material and visual rhetorics function within the contexts of the mass media and the public, though their objects of analysis are less concerned with public memory and national identity than with the processes that make possible specific representations of the body in popular culture. Brouwer examines the sociocultural contexts that inform the practice of wearing HIV/AIDS tattoos. Considered a form of “self-stigmatization,” the practice of wearing the tattoo is “a particular communicative and performative strategy grounded in visibility politics and practiced in the context of AIDS activism” (Brouwer 206). Noting its precariousness as a social act, Brouwer writes that the tattoo “simultaneously disrupts expectations of the appearance of health and challenges ‘norms’ of patient behavior, yet [. . .] also invites surveillance [. . .] and runs the risk of reducing the wearer’s identity to ‘disease carrier’” (206). Brouwer’s rich analysis not only illuminates the motivations behind this powerful social practice but also provides a more empowered and “sensitive understanding of the communication practices of marginal or stigmatized social groups” by understanding how “performative communication” illustrates the connections “between the margins and center of power” (217–218). Also focused on the sociocultural contexts that allow for resistance through bodily inscription, Dickson analyzes the iconic 1991 Vanity Fair cover photo of actor Demi Moore, which depicted her “seven months pregnant and wearing nothing but diamonds” (297). Dickson questions whether the representation of Moore’s pregnant body can be seen as “liberat[ing] the feminine body,” as Moore claimed it did in her description of the photo as a “feminist statement” (297). Dickson understands the photo as a “textual event” and considers the cultural contexts that shape its “production and reception” (299). A material rhetorical analysis of these “bodily, visual, and textual” inscriptions allows Dickson to better understand the hegemonic discourses that inform bodily inscription and how such inscriptions get instantiated materially (311–312).

Building on Blair and Dickson’s approaches and giving more equal treatment to spatial analysis and the impact of physical space on the body, Mary Lay Schuster’s material rhetorical analysis of Baby Haven, a free-standing birth center in middle America, describes the consequences of the center on the minds and bodies of clients who come there seeking an “ideal birth,” or one that resists “the construction of their pregnant bodies as risky entities best managed by medical experts” (3). Schuster describes Baby Haven as a rhetorically powerful space that allows clients to “rewrite cultural inscriptions” that construct the body, in order to forward an understanding of the birthing process that works against the hegemonic biomedical model (30). Also affording more equal treatment to physical space and its impact on bodies, but discussing in addition the material component of textual artifacts, Christina Haas analyzes the work of a Permanent Injunction posted on the front door of an Ohio abortion clinic. The Injunction is meant to deter abortion protesters and create a safe space for women who seek to have an abortion performed (Crowley 359). Haas describes the Injunction in terms of its material rhetorical and cultural dimensions, but frames the document more so as a mediating device that helps to make tangible the “conceptual distinction between public and private” (234). Through its articulation of spatial boundaries that clarify where protests may be staged, the Injunction acts on the bodies within and outside of the abortion clinic to protect the employees of the clinic, thus fostering a better sense of safety among clinic workers (224).

Multimodality as a Component of Materiality

In addition to material rhetoric’s focus on physical space and the built environment, fields related to composition and media studies have begun to acknowledge the materiality of multimodal texts and digital artifacts. Hayles, for example, argues for a multimodal, material literacy in her keynote address at the 2002 Computers and Writing Conference. While the recent focus on visual rhetoric is a clear step in the right direction, she says, “we need to develop modes of critical attention responsive to the full range of [. . .] signifying elements in electronic work, including animation, sound, graphics, screen design, and navigational functionalities” (“Deeper” 371). In acknowledging that our vocabulary for analyzing printed text is insufficient for the critique of digital texts, Hayles broaches the intersections of digital texts and materiality (373). To this end, she first notes that electronic texts require a “critical language” sensitive to the interplay of word and image; she then sees this interplay as indicative of larger issues related to the broader practices of multimodality: “This new critical vocabulary,” she says, “will further realize that navigation, animation, and other digital effects are not neutral devices but designed practices that enter deeply into the work’s structures; it will eschew the print-centric assumption that a literacy work is an abstract verbal construction and focus on the materiality of the medium” (373). Aligned with Hayles, Barbara Warnick notes that “the material form of a representation is an intrinsic dimension of the user’s experience of it, and so critical approaches need to take into account the materiality of the text, as well as its content and style of expression” (328). The GPS, as I will describe in chapter four, is one example of a multimodal, material artifact that not only epitomizes the variety of content, contexts, and styles of expression that the text may produce but also helps illuminate the value of a visual-material rhetorical approach for the study of multimodal artifacts.2

Similar to the discussions of material rhetoric that I’ve described here, this book focuses on analyses of specific spaces, the artifacts that contribute to the rhetorical power of those spaces, and consequently the impact of those rhetorical spaces on the bodies that inhabit or once inhabited them. Again, this book also moves across visual-material artifacts such as spatial representations of mill life, park memorials, and maps, in order to more overtly call attention to or reconcile versions of contested space and show the value of visual-material rhetorics within and beyond the field of rhetoric. Through a consistent focus on these artifacts’ selectivity; their material, visual, and textual composition; and their subsequent impact on human, posthuman, and non-human bodies residing or once residing in the spaces they represent, this book understands these sites as visual-material rhetorics of heterotopic space. To arrive at such an understanding then requires that we acknowledge the ideas of Blair and Foucault as part and parcel of a theory of visual-material rhetorics.

In Foucault’s Theory of Discourse, an Understanding of Space as Rhetorical (Or, En Route to a Visual-Material Rhetorics of Heterotopic Space)

While Foucault is of course no stranger to scholars of rhetoric, his concept of heterotopias is not one that is frequently invoked within the field; rather, it is more common, especially among new graduate students of rhetoric, to read Foucault’s work within the context of his theory of discourse. Because his work on heterotopias focuses more directly on his theory of spatiality, it is often more familiar to those who study geography or critical cartographies. Nonetheless, Foucault’s theory of discourse and his theory of space share some common themes; in fact, the curious reader may notice the seeming stylistic and thematic similarities between these two areas of his work. Moreover, readers may account for these similarities by noting the close chronological proximity of his initial articulations of these ideas. That is, the ideas underpinning Foucault’s essay, “Of Other Spaces,” preceded publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge by only two years. While “Of Other Spaces” was officially published in 1984 as “Des Espaces Autres” in the French journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité, it was in March of 1967, in France, that Foucault first gave the lecture that would then serve as the basis for this essay, in which he posits his theory of heterotopias (22). Only two years later, in 1969, The Archaeology of Knowledge, or L’Archeologie du Savoir, in which Foucault sets out much of his theory of discourse, was first published in France. Subsequently, to read these two works side by side—especially to read “Of Other Spaces” alongside “The Unities of Discourse” within The Archaeology of Knowledge—quite seemingly invites a reading of space as discursive. As Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg write in The Rhetorical Tradition, Foucault’s theory of discourse

[seeks to] restore to discourse its character as an event. [. . .] [It] describes the relationship between language and knowledge; the functions of disciplines, institutions, and other discourse communities; the ways that particular statements come to have truth value; the constraints on the production of discourse about objects of knowledge; the effects of discursive practices on social action; and the uses of discourse to exercise power. (1127)

Likewise, Foucault’s theory of space may be understood as an active endeavor—one that is concerned with teasing out the relationships between space and knowledge, understanding how spaces may constrain meaning by appearing simple while also concealing knowledge, and understanding how “our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down” (“Of Other Spaces” 23).

Foucault’s theory of heterotopias asks that we take a close look at our hierarchic “history of space,” which he notes may be traced roughly to the Middle Ages—we must understand this hierarchic ensemble of places in order to expose the different relationships that delineate them—this “ensemble of places,” he says, includes “sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places. [. . .] It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement” (“Of Other Spaces” 22). Today, he says, this space of emplacement “has been substituted for extension,” which is defined by “relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids”; the intricacies of these sites then manifest, he says, when dealing with “the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine; the circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on a telephone line). [. . .] In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography” (23). Interestingly, we see in Foucault’s description of the contemporary manifestation of the hierarchic ensemble of places, or in the transition from emplacement to extension, allusions to the spatial dimensions and problematics of mediated bodies functioning within a technologically mediated society. Moreover, the “relations of proximity,” or the series, trees, and grids to which Foucault refers, then make possible human practices that, as Biesecker might put it, work both “within and against the grain” to resist hegemonic constructions of space (357). That is, as Biesecker describes within the context of discussing the “implications of Foucault’s work for Rhetoric” (352), the practices that are made possible through these grids also “carry within themselves what Foucault calls ‘a kind of virtual break’ out of which transgression may ensue” (356). Such acts of transgression thus constitute a form of resistance. This notion of resistance, Biesecker feels, is rooted in Foucault’s “non-monumentalized conception of power” (354). I argue here that Biesecker’s ideas about Foucault’s theory of resistance are not only relevant to the field of rhetoric in general but also to how we might understand the rhetorical study of space more specifically.

Biesecker suggests that Foucault indeed has a theory of resistance, and that it is embedded largely in his understanding (and our misunderstanding) of power (pouvoir). That is, “to understand power only as oppressive is reductive” (Biesecker 354). Rather, when we understand that the meaning of the French verb pouvoir loses some of its dimension in the English translation, we begin to understand the ways in which power can be productive for Foucault. Here, Biesecker quotes from Gayatri Spivak: “Pouvoir is of course ‘power.’ But there is also a sense of ‘can-do’-ness in pouvoir [. . .] it is the commonest way of saying ‘can’ in the French language” (qtd. in Biesecker 355). Power then conveys not just limits, but also a “being-able” that happens at multiple levels of practice that at once rely on “existing lines of sense” and “carry within themselves a ‘virtual break’” (357). Resistance thus works “within and against the grain” (357). It “names the nonlegible practices that are performed within the weave but are asymmetrical to it. As Foucault put it, ‘They are the odd term in relations of power’” (357).

Foucault’s program in “The Unities of Discourse” is compatible with Biesecker’s description of how resistance works “within and against the grain” (357). Moreover, “The Unities of Discourse” not only puts into clearer context how scholars of rhetoric might proceed in thinking about discourse but also how they might begin to understand a Foucauldian notion of space. Like his theory of heterotopias, Foucault’s theory of discourse critiques historiography and its propensity toward creating normative continuities; it does so by problematizing a “whole mass of notions” such as tradition, origin, influence, causality, unity, development, and coherence (Archaeology 21), all of which have the effect of “master[ing] time through a perpetually reversible relation between an origin and a term that are never given, but always at work” (22). Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space is founded on a similar idea that contrasts “indefinitely accumulating time” with “time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect” in order to problematize normative continuities and tease apart the various realities that compose a given space; these realities are time sensitive, reliant on cultural contexts, and often oppose or challenge others’ claims to knowledge (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 26).

In the “Unities of Discourse,” Foucault asks us to understand the rules such that we might break them, so to speak; that is, we need to “accept the groupings that history suggests only to subject them at once to interrogation; to break them up and then to see whether they can be legitimately reformed; or whether other groupings should be made; to replace them in a more general space which, while dissipating their apparent familiarity, makes it possible to construct a theory of them” (Archaelogy 26). Foucault’s theory of space also implicitly asks us to interrogate the groupings that history suggests and to question whether they may be viewed from the point of their discontinuity rather than from that of their perceived continuity. He asks that we resist hierarchies of space and look instead for knowledge in unfamiliar places; in doing so, he not only asks us to understand space as epistemic but also as discursive. And if we subscribe to Bizzell and Herzberg’s reading of Foucault’s notion of discourse as rhetorical, then we may likewise understand space not only as discursive but also as rhetorical. That is, Bizzell and Herzberg note that although

Foucault avoids talking about rhetoric, preferring discourse as his comprehensive term, there is no question that his theory addresses a number of ideas that are central to modern rhetoric. He makes a powerful argument that discourse (for which we may read rhetoric) is epistemic; he states in compelling terms that discourse is a form of social action; he enriches and complicates the notion of context with a network of archives, disciplines, institutions, and social practices that control the production of discourse. (1128)

Foucault’s theory of space and its implicit discursivities help illuminate the power structures inherent in spatial relationships such that we might then find within them the sort of “virtual break” that Biesecker describes. In this way, as Biesecker puts it, “power names not the imposition of a limit that constrains human thought and action but a being-able that is made possible by a grid of intelligibility” (356). This sort of “being-able,” however, is nonetheless constrained in terms of its implications for the fully embodied, individualized subject. On the one hand, as Biesecker describes in depth, Foucault’s later work (particularly, she says, in The Uses of Pleasure), addresses “the ‘stylized practices of the self’ or ‘aesthetics of existence’ [which] may be read as a concerted effort on his part to specify the place and function of the deliberate intending subject whose acts, though made possible by the social apparatus or field, cannot be reduced to the mere playing out of a code” (358). On the other hand, however, subjectivity, for Foucault, even in his later work, is still understood as a consequence of societally imposed power relations, even though he sees subject positions as uniquely individual. (Biesecker 360). In this way, for Foucault, human beings may be understood as actively taking part in the environments in which they are situated, but these acts of participation are imposed on them by cultural norms and societal groups.3 This negotiation between the practices of the self and the imposing cultural constructs that influence those practices has been the site of much contestation over what, for Foucault, has been viewed as constituting his theory of resistance.

Foucault, Heterotopias, and Material Rhetoric

In describing the universalizing practices of space such that those practices provide opportunities for the identification of breaks or fissures, or possibilities for resistance, Foucault does take us closer to the notion of an embodied subject who may work with and against the grain of societal constructs. Nonetheless, Foucault’s view of the universalized, resisting subject as always already responding to imposed societal constructs may be understood as constraining or limiting possibilities for a more empowered view of embodied knowledge. Such limited possibilities for the universalized body arguably perpetuate what Hayles has termed Foucault’s “erasure of embodiment” (194). I argue here that while Foucault’s theory of heterotopias allows us to identify the universalizing functions of space such that we might simultaneously identify ways to work against them, his theory does not readily address to a fuller extent the idea of individual, bodily experience within heterotopic spaces. In other words, I argue that to expose the normative functions of space and the possibilities they provide for resistance is not necessarily to understand or describe those functions and possibilities as implicated in embodied, material practice. To derive such insights about embodied, spatial rhetorics from his theory of space thus requires extending Foucault’s work to account more explicitly for the embodied nature of physical space. This is precisely the point at which Blair’s work becomes useful.

That is, while Foucault helps us to understand space as rhetorical, some trickiness arises when we must also understand space and its attendant visual and material artifacts not only as rhetorical and powerful in that “can-do” sense but also as embodied. To help make these connections clearer and to address the dilemma of embodiment requires several steps. First, it is necessary to describe how heterotopias may be specifically characterized according to Foucault’s theory. Next, it is necessary to explain the limitation of Foucault’s work, primarily as articulated through Hayles’ notion of his erasure of embodiment, which, while compatible with an understanding of his theory of resistance, calls for a more explicit focus on the idea of “how embodied humans interact with the material conditions in which they are placed” (Hayles 195). At this point, then, it becomes possible to describe how Blair’s approach works to supplement or extend the potential limitation of Foucault’s theory by providing a point of entry into a visual-material rhetorics of heterotopic space.

Defining Heterotopias

Foucault suggests that we all reside in heterogeneous spaces—that “we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things”; rather, “we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another” (“Of Other Spaces” 23). We can try to characterize these sites by “looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined” (23). Sites of transportation, for example, may include streets or trains; “sites of temporary relaxation” may include “cafes, cinemas, [or] beaches” (24). Foucault is most interested, though, in those sites “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). Such spaces, he says, fall into two main categories: utopias and heterotopias.

Utopias, he says, “are sites with no real place”; they present a perfected vision of society and are “fundamentally unreal” (24). Heterotopias, rather, may be found in “every culture, in every civilization” (24). Heterotopias, Foucault writes, are “real” 4 places “that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society” (24). They are akin to “counter-sites,” or an

effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (24)

Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia as counter-site, representation, reflection, and discursive, contested site would seem to open up the possibility for resistance, or for a site that, as Biesecker has put it, “names the nonlegible practices that are performed within the weave but are asymmetrical to it” (357). As the analysis of photo 22727 in chapter one helped demonstrate, a map is indeed a representation of a particular “real” territory, though often conveys multiple ideas about a place. These multiple ideas about a place are often borne out of knowledge claims that result in competing or contested discourses about what counts as the most “accurate” representation of a single territory. Memorials too count as places that represent, contest, speak of, or invert the “real” sites that they call out or commemorate. Thus, maps as well as commemorative artifacts may be understood as heterotopias. Already, then, it is possible to see that Foucault’s terminology can account for the varied contexts that help shape our potential understandings of a place. Following his initial defining of heterotopias, Foucault then provides some criteria to help identify these sites and the characteristics that qualify them as such.

Foucault’s Six Principles of Heterotopology