Discourse is the particular way of thinking about a topic (gender)
Modernists look at how gender affects behaviour and how to gain equality. A postmodernist would not try to look at how gender differs but how gender is defined by other people and consider why it exists.
Sartre
'All reality is relative to what other people think'
Applied to research process by 'critical theory', which breaks down all traditional rules of research to use unconventional techniques to understand how people think and feel about the world.