Discourse is another important concept in Cultural Studies. Every discourse is a way of talking about something. Cultural Studies holds that there is no one legitimate way of describing anything; all descriptions are descriptions with their respective frameworks as well as purposes. Discourses may also be described as objects, structured systems, texts and are ideological systems.

Culture is maps of meaning that are always shifting and these meanings acquire a certain stability which is an illusion as these are temporary stabilizations. Whenever we move from discourse to discourse and also within a discourse as we move through time, this stability is broken. Michel Foucault, the French philosopher has highlighted the role of power as knowledge.

Today gender is not understood in the traditional way of understanding gender as a discursive term and sex as an essential biological identity. Both sex and gender are discursive terms though this is not to deny the materiality of the body but to realize that even as we describe sexual identity, we are using discourses. In that sense we have the idea of the illusion of gender as given to us by Judith Butler:

“The effect of gender . . . must be understood as the mundane ways in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” Therefore, we find that there was a critic of traditional feminism in newer ways of looking at genders as a key concept in Cultural Studies.