Bourdieu - Dominacion Masculin - Notas

CULTURAL STUDI ES 1 7 ( 3 / 4 ) 2 0 0 3 , 4 6 8 4 9 4
Cultural Studies

ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950238032000083908

Bridget Fowler

READING PIERRE BOURDIEUS

MASCULINE DOMINATION

: NOTES
TOWARDS AN INTERSECTIONAL
ANALYSIS OF GENDER, CULTURE
AND CLASS

Abstract

This article analyses Bourdieus late work on masculine domination, in the
context of his wider theory of practice. It assesses the logic of his argument
and focuses particularly on the wide-ranging case he makes for womens
complicity with such gender domination, alongside their opposition to it.
The question of whether Bourdieus sociology is unacceptably pessimistic
about the possibilities for social transformation is then considered, taking
up certain key contemporary debates about his work. The nal section
draws on Bourdieus rudimentary sketches from various sources for an
intersectionalist study of gender and class, deriving ultimately from the
uncompromising exposure of economic and social interests in

Distinction

.
Using independent evidence, it traces some of the less-remarked conse-
quences of womens entry into well-paid employment on the labour
market: not least, the impact of their work on the class structure and the
recomposition of domestic labour on a class basis.

Keywords

Bourdieu; masculinity; domination; agency; class; doxa

08 rCUS 17-3&4 Fowler (JB/D) Page 468 Thursday, July 3, 2003 1:51 PM

RE ADI NG BOURDI E U S

MA S CUL I NE D O MI NA T I O N

4 6 9

I say that the idea of masculinity is one of the last refuges of the identity of
the dominated classes [. . .] its characteristic of people who have little to
fall back on except their labour-power and sometimes their ghting
strength.
(Bourdieu, 1993c)

OUR DI E U C ONT I NUE D T O

speak in public on the subject of masculine
domination right up to his death. Since his major book on the subject

Masculine Domination

(2001a) was translated shortly beforehand, it is now
tting to review the place of his theory of gender relations in his entire socio-
logical approach (see also Lane, 2000: 1309; McNay, 2000: ch.2). He broached
what he calls the paradoxal break with the doxa of masculine domination at
several points (2001a: 2). Initially, his ethnographic studies of Kabylia in the
1960s situate the opposition between masculine and feminine as the most impor-
tant classication and social division of this group of Southern Algerian mountain
peasants.

1

By 1980, with

Le Sens Pratique

(1980a: 2467), Bourdieu was formu-
lating a model of masculine domination in advanced capitalist countries. In 1990,
this surfaced in a lengthy article on the subject, the working paper for the later
book (2001a). From 1988, his writings include brief gender analyses, identifying
the exclusions of women from the best

grandes coles

(at the level of higher
education) and from the restricted or artistic eld (in the sphere of cultural
production). A series of writings, including

Distinction

(1984), formulate a new
mode of social reproduction from classic, family-based capitalism to a school-
mediated form of social reproduction in which heirs had to certicate their
capacities through exams before they could acquire their wealth. Privileged
forms of reproduction are now conceptualized as taking place via both domestic
cultural transmission and access to positions commanding very high salaries, and
not merely via a return on capital in the form of dividends. In principle, such
highly-paid positions are legitimated as open to anyone.

Distinction

, dazzling in its shuttling

between opposed perspectives on
culture, serves to expose the underlying historical changes in French society,
with the decline of classic manufacturing industry, the waning of trade-unionism
and the increased seductions of the market.

The State Nobility

, on the other hand,
studies the transformations within the tertiary academic eld itself, focusing
more exclusively on the making of an exam-based, state-certied bourgeoisie.
The text pinpoints the post-1970s pre-eminence of the academic disciplines of
management and administration, in contrast with the earlier disciplinary leader-
ship of philosophy, with its rigorous independence.

State Nobility

alludes eet-
ingly to the simultaneous entry of women into higher education and into former
male preserves (1996a: 287).
I shall argue that Bourdieus sociology is more powerful than his critics
suggest, although at his death he still had some way to go in putting the woman
back in.

2

Kabylia is used in


as a canonical or exemplary
B


4 7 0 CUL T UR AL S T UDI E S

case and it does

undoubtedly serve to reveal the

relative autonomy

of gender
domination. That is, it examines the extraordinary structural constancy,
irrespective of mode of production, of the pejorative attribution of nature to
women and the honoric award of culture to men, across different periods,
including that of capitalist modernity.

3

Bourdieus theory of practice offers the use of an illuminating set of conceptual
tools, which in my view, provide a better basis for empirical analysis than those
offered by Habermas, Foucault or Giddens. However, its application to masculine
domination is not without some key areas of contention for the development of
feminist theory, as we shall see, especially in terms of historical transformations in
patriarchy, and the vital issue of the roles for agency and determinism in his model.
He has been powerfully challenged on these issues, especially by Judith Butler. I
shall then tease out from his entire body of writings an analysis of the mutual
implications of gender and class in contemporary Western societies. It needs to be
emphasized that this intersectionalist analysis does not appear in Bourdieus book
on masculine domination. I therefore risk undermining both his late reections on
the analytical autonomy of gender domination and of being politically incorrect in
tackling these issues here. Whatever the pitfalls, I want to develop a new argument,
drawing from Bourdieus earlier assessments of the strategies of the

grande bour-
geoisie

, the class that, in Britain, sociologists call the upper service class. Because
of constraints of length, I shall offer here an unremittingly harsh, objectivist view
of strategic interests.

Bourdieus theory of gender practice

It is not the phallus (or its absence) which is the basis of that worldview,
rather it is that worldview, which, being organized according to the
division into relational genders, male and female, can institute the phallus,
constituted as the symbol of virility, of the specically male point of honour
(nif), and the difference between biological bodies as objective foundations
of the difference between the sexes, in the sense of genders constructed as
two hierarchized social essences. [. . .] The particular strength of the
masculine sociodicy [or vindication of patriarchy BF] comes from the fact
that it combines and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship
of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a
naturalized social construction.
(2001a: 223)
For Bourdieu, the sexual cosmology, or world-view in its broadest sense, is tied
to a sexual typology of the body. To be more precise, the social arbitrary of gender
domination is tied into natural differences or even converted into nature (2001a:
19). When this is tacitly and without question assumed as obvious, we can speak




4 7 1

of a groups internal cognitive categories replicating the objective structures of the
social world. Bourdieu refers to such a state as the doxic attitude. Thus it can be
seen that Bourdieu breaks with the biologically-founded essentialism of Freuds
naive theory of penis envy, while remaining faithful to its spirit.

4

For him, there is
no instinctual or necessary biological base for such domination, which might, in
turn, create penis envy: masculine domination is a characteristic, instead, of
specic symbolic structures associated historically with phallocentric presupposi-
tions. With the exception of the outer limits framed by physiology, such as the
distinctive menstruation of women, it is due to the strength of social classications
alone that there are constructed those salient differences between men and women
which are believed to be inherently biological: motherly indulgence, paternal
remoteness and so on. Bourdieu may surprise his readers by linking the structures
of the Kabylian communities in Algeria with many practices in todays Western
societies to constitute a single phallocentric Mediterranean/ Northern European
culture. He rejects, however, any presumption of the necessary universality of the
gender difference. Instead, he locates the origins of such a widespread phallocen-
tric culture in Ancient Greek agricultural society, with its profound historical
resonance for many other later societies.
In the doxic universe of Kabylia, women are connoted with certain negative
qualities and men with positive qualities, like nobles. The linguistic root of
virtue is itself vir, male. Masculinity entails immersion in the destiny of
warriors, with their periodic engagement in murderous acts, their release from
the softness of mothers and their freedom from the petty calculativeness of the
female, with her market haggling (2001a: 17). It requires brief but spectacular
and memorable acts, typied in the male monopoly of throat cutting to kill
beasts. The harsh verdicts of male executive powers against offenders similarly
assert masculine force, thus preserving the threatened unity of the clan against
internal deviance (2001a: 301).

5

For women, on the other hand, there are

only

menial, soft, repetitive and private tasks. In this way, when Bourdieu earlier
quotes Baudelaires

Hautontimoroumenos

, he interprets the poem as a refusal to
adopt a stable angle of vision from either extreme position (1996b: 78): I am
the wound and yet the knife/ . . . The torturer and yet he who is ayed. It may
have been Baudelaires poem that provided the potent imagery and enabling
double vision to have liberated Bourdieus own perspectival view of gender
divisions, which captures so well the enduring clash between two viewpoints.

6

At the most profound level, the social constructions of masculinity and
femininity are actually

written on the body

in the form of facial masks over emotion
or controls, bodily stances, gaits, postures, etc., much as the military man is
drilled into his straight back (1990b: 26; 2001a: 2233).

7

To fully grasp this
somatic expression of the political which Bourdieu calls the bodily hexis is
simultaneously to lay bare all the false essentialisms of sexism, even those which
reappear, in reversed form, in feminist theorists such as Irigaray.

8

The body for
Bourdieu, as for Pascal earlier, is a

pense-bte

a thinking animal (1990b: 11;



1997: 169). For Kabylians most notably, gender is ultimately a psychosomatic
matter, conceived in terms of bodily oppositions: the straight man vs. the
crooked woman, the masculine direct gaze vs. the female downward gaze. But
over millennia, the long work of socialization goes into a process of naturalizing
the social.

9

Such processes have profound consequences for the individual sense
of self, demonstrated most graphically in the literal agoraphobia (dread of
assembly) of a minority of women, who rule themselves out of the public space
from which they have historically been excluded (2001a: 39).
For Bourdieu, it is through bodily dressage (2001a: 62) that culture is
primarily transmitted and a hallmark of his approach is his emphasis on the bodily
feel for the game. We should think less, he writes, of action in relation to rules
or categories of thought than of action stemming from a social mastery of the
body. In particular, dispositions to certain types of practice reect and reinstate
both class distinctions and gender difference. These are at once mental structures
and physical gestures, intellectual divisions and gut feelings. Thus, women may
still walk with constrained, short steps, even when dressed in trousers and at
heels. For Bourdieu, such examples often indicate hysteresis, or training for a
situation that no longer prevails. These permanent ways of holding the body, he
suggests following Elias are accompanied by mild discomfort and an easily
induced shame. Women, historically, have been repressed into acquiring a fear
of bodily ridicule, not least through a continual routine of anatomical self-
scrutiny. In contrast, such a discipline of denigratory self-regard is only forced
on men as the outcome of the degradation routines linked to interrogation and
torture

(2001a: 22, 29). Another example makes a similar point: historically,
male honour has been marked by mens bodily bearing of arms Jews, then,
who were forbidden to carry weapons, were dominated structurally as though
they were women (2001a: 51).
Bourdieus theory seems to me to have an extraordinary grasp of the dignity
or

illusio

(commitment) at issue in all the various games of

masculine honour

. In
the West, as we have seen, pure masculine domination typically exerts its effects
only on lower-class lads who have no other investments.

10

One of the chief
distinctions of Bourdieus theory of masculine domination is its capacity to grasp
simultaneously both the purely subjective,

symbolic stakes

which preoccupy men
when they experience struggles between each other for reputation, and the

economic/political interests

fuelling their actions. In relation to the illusio to the
game of masculinity, this is true whether these interests surface directly through
the ghting honour (of the Kabylean adult male) or whether they are translated
into competition for the stakes of success in the scientic, military or artistic
elds (in more differentiated societies). The life-long artistic rivalry between
Picasso and Matisse, despite their friendship and their shared commitment to the
necessity for modern art, might serve as an example.
Men alone are identied with world-making: they monopolize the most
delicate and prestigious of human inventive actions. However, men also trap




4 7 3

themselves

by the possibility of ignominy and ridicule. Bourdieu documents this
by a careful reading of Virginia Woolfs

To the Lighthouse

, which he understands as
the work and peculiar insights of the female outsider (

une lucide exclue

) (1990b:
2426; 2001a: 6980). At issue in this text is especially Woolfs portrayal of the
oscillation between

tyranny

and

self-doubt

on the part of her patriarch, Mr
Ramsay, a gure who retains the character of an absolute ruler within his family
despite his philosophical stance of liberal enlightenment. By contrast, Woolfs
women whose eggs are not all in one basket run less of a risk of humiliation
and failure than do their men. Female honour is more a negative matter of
chastity and delity. Indeed, for Bourdieu,

masculine honour is at once a privilege
and a trap

. This theory of honour also suggests the supports for the

libido
dominandi

(the desire to dominate), which is at the heart of masculine domina-
tion. Not least among these is the sexual charisma attached to the powerful,
which serves to attract women (2001a: 7980) as Bill Clinton knew so well.
Bourdieu then proposes a telling clarication of the doxic relation to the
world. Although much of what is done occurs because it is taken-for-granted
or doxic - not everything has this quality. There is still room for struggle over
ideas and ideologies. If men are temporarily diminished sleeping, battle-weary
then women can assert their feminine superiority through the use of persuasive
wiles or magical techniques. However, such forms of soft violence often
redound on their female perpetrators by making them appear naturally malign:
their inferiority is thus conrmed (2001a: 32). Throughout Kabylia and the West,
a favoured means of women demonstrating their view of justice has been through
the choice of martyrdom. Thus a woman, whose husband refuses to share the
domestic tasks, may work herself to the bone. Through opting for this path,
women lose all physical pleasures but gain the more enduring assurance of
spiritual or moral rewards. In Bourdieus eyes, this is the radical extreme of gift-
exchange, for it is a form of self-destructive giving of oneself for which there is
no adequate return gift (2001a: 32).

11

All ruling groups the ruling gender
included seek to gain the advantages of power whilst simultaneously warding
off the dangerous rise of resentment and martyrs.
Sintomer (1996) remarks that Bourdieu identied strongly with the justice
of the struggle against womens domination. Yet, Bourdieu has also maintained
a longstanding critique of intellectuals epistemocratic fallacy, that is their
projection of their own leisurely conditions of life on to others and in particular,
their misguided assumption that if something is shown to be logically or scien-
tically unacceptable it will be superseded by new forms of social practice. One
implication of this is that changed patterns of gender action are unlikely to
emerge as expected on the rationalist model, simply as the consequence of
womens awareness and consciousness-raising. Thus, on the one hand, against
radical feminists, Bourdieu stresses the paradoxical rationality or at least the

consistency

of non-rational patterns, enfolded within the traditional division of
genders in the artisanalpeasant world. On the other hand, against Choderow



and other relationist theorists, he emphasizes also the longevity, subtlety and
emotional power of gender oppositions. Despite this two-handed juggling, it
could be argued that Bourdieu has neglected the occasions when patriarchal
domination has been publicly opposed. For example, he omits those historically
resonant instances of what Witz calls strategic usurpations that appear in
concerted female practices to end male monopolies. The case of the forcible
ending of the male monopoly over medicine is a useful tale here (see Witz,
1992). Even if we grasp that female

complicity

often derives from a mood of
resignation (Bourdieu, 2000: ch. 6), he has sometimes stressed too much
womens adaptive

collusion

at the expense of their unhappy consciousness.

Bourdieus most recent thought

If the hidden constants behind patriarchy within very different types of social
structure are sometimes forgotten, there are also genuine changes. Of these, the
most signicant are the twin principles of gender-universalism in education and
the entry of women into the labour market. This is so, even if here women often
undertake, on a paid or commodied basis, the work that they formerly did
within the home. As he shows in Kabylia, the family house up to now has been
the paramount site of the sexual difference, but such difference has always also
been legitimated by other key elds: the State as the apex of the eld of power,
and the elds of education and the Church. Even in the formally-equal world of
modern academia, which has been the concern of his sustained empirical work,
Bourdieu shows that the hierarchy of disciplines has been reconstituted to retain
male supremacy, with the most prestigious, hard specialisms being the most
monopolized by men (2001a: 91).
Thus, Bourdieu offers three alternative explanations for the persistence he
detects underlying the labour market. First, there is the continued complicity of
the female habitus, when, for example, women perpetuate within the labour
market the concern for appearances and for hostess activities that they possess
in the private sphere. Secondly, there is the invisibly sexualized arena of the
performance of many jobs. These tacitly disadvantage female employees and
allow men access to the higher reaches of power. Thirdly, there is womens
greater realism as to the work involved in simultaneously maintaining domestic
solidarities and their work. Under the traditional division of labour, this provokes
a lesser engagement than males with the full range of professional stakes in their
respective elds.
Bourdieu progressively shifted over time away from reliance on the rst
explanation, towards a recognition of the more complex issues associated with
the second and third. Thus, in

Distinction

, Bourdieu vividly dissects the seduc-
tions of the growing service-sector economy. Here new female professionals in
areas like aromatherapy or reexology use their traditional expertise in symbolic




4 7 5

goods, but do so within the expanded spheres of commodied consumption, for
example in massage, herbalism and interior decoration. In


,
this same democratization and market extension of luxury is again invoked, but
it is now tellingly linked to the

alienated

choices of women. The limit case of such
commercialized care is the Japanese hostesses of luxury clubs, providing specif-
ically-tailored emotional and sexual services for their male clients (2001a: 100).
Contrasted with these emotional services is the unalienated relationship of
love, to which Bourdieu dedicates a poignant postscript. More precisely, love
here is based on a

willed alienation

of the selfs immediate desires, within a wider
context of reciprocity (for each partner). Such an equality is delicate and easily
undermined. However, its real existence needs recognition for, like the gift
exchange between parent and child, love transcends those disenchanted inter-
pretations that reduce it peremptorily to mere sacrice or advantage:
Pure love, the art for arts sake of love, is a relatively recent historical
invention. . . . It is probably found only rarely in its fully realized form,
and as a limit that is hardly ever attained is extremely fragile [. . .] endlessly
threatened by the crisis induced by the return of egoistic calculation or the
simple effect of routinisation [. . . .] [T]he mutual recognition by which
each recognizes himself or herself in another whom he or she recognizes
as another self and who also recognizes him or her as such, can lead, in its
perfect reexivity, beyond the alternatives of egoism and altruism.
(2001a: 111)
Here Bourdieu breaks not only with a section of radical feminists but also with
the harsh view of love as a fraught and dangerous trap for the ego. This is
expressed in its most acute form in the work of Sartre. For long his target for
his inadequate grasp of structural constraints determining practice, Bourdieu
notes that Sartres

Being and Nothingness

metaphorically extends this atomizing
perspective even into the sphere of love. This occurs by means of a whole series
of misogynist oppositions: thus the holed woman threatens, in the act of
intercourse, to castrate the man; the female as a thing

in

herself

, stands against
the males assertion

for

himself

, and so on. (

LEtre et le Nant

, 1943: 699706,
quoted in Bourdieu, 1990b: 15). Going further, the analysis of willed alienation
amidst reciprocity could be extended to the love of homosexuals. Their distinc-
tiveness he located in turn, in a symbolic revolution aimed at cutting the
connection between sexual relations and power relations (2001a: 120).
This short postscript is of immense theoretical signicance, for it serves to
reveal the guiding theoretical presuppositions behind Bourdieus sociology and
anthropology. Thus contrary to Alexanders reading of Bourdieu as sharing a
combative, Hobbesian, model of humankind, in which individuals struggle
remorselessly to gain power over their fellows, we see here his total rupture with
the Christian/Kantian opposition of altruism to egoism (Alexander, 1995: 150).



Implicit in this is his break like Marx and Durkheim with early capitalist
notions of the liberal self, since he views the self as both

socialized altruistic
and strategic, possessing interests. It follows that while Bourdieu critiques a
phallocentric view that denies women the right to control over their bodies, he
does not subscribe to the highly individualist premises which underpin many
liberal feminist analyses.

Areas of contention in Bourdieus


Bourdieu, Butler and agency

Bourdieus social theory has recently been contested in a new debate of con-
siderable relevance for feminist thought. Judith Butler (1997) has attacked the
socio-linguistic implications of his theory of practice as conservative. Such
criticisms are not entirely without foundation, for it is difcult to see where
Bourdieu

does

identify the source of dynamism within the development of
language (see especially Bourdieu, 1991). Indeed, he regards the linguistic
market for popular speech as inherently weak and relegated to an unofcial
existence, cut off from the places where decisions are made. For him, popular
language emerges in public only in marginal areas such as pubs and cafes, where
working-class men and women can speak freely, sustaining a culture that has
historically been unconstrained by the necessity for politeness. From his French
vantage point and his acquaintance with a culture that is rigorously prescriptive
of bourgeois literary linguistic usage, Bourdieu did not notice how working-class
or Afro-American dialects, under certain circumstances, could become accepted
into the linguistic mainstream. Rather than remaining purely within the demotic
currents of street-culture, a fertile zone of contact develops, within which
transgressive developments of speech are incorporated into the language. As Walt
Whitman once argued, it is often from the most resonating areas of popular
culture that linguistic change is generated, language itself functioning like the
yeast in a lump of dough (see, for example, Fowler, 1997; Grignon and Passeron,
1989).
Butler is therefore to some degree correct when she sees her efforts to
theorize the idea of resignication and her stress on an autonomous

play

with
gender identities (1990) as being threatened by Bourdieus theory. As she
remarks in

Excitable Speech

, the entire premises of queer theory as of the black
revalorizations of terms like nigger are challenged by Bourdieus

Language and
Symbolic Power

. Bourdieu interprets all such counterhegemonic developments as
equivalent to the merely childish innovations of literary experimenters. He
argues at this point, tellingly that it is not enough to speak performatively
as in the example, I pronounce you man and wife since social

authorization

is
also necessary. In other words, social power is a prerequisite for inuential




4 7 7

speech and non-standard forms are permanently excluded from this. Butler, by
contrast, recalls vividly those gures, such as the Afro-American, Rosa Parks,
who
sat in the front of the bus [despite] having no prior right to do so guaranteed
by any of the segregationist conventions of the South. And yet, in laying
claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed
a certain authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of
overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy.
(Butler, 1997: 147)
Butler thus champions the claims of those whose conceptual exibility and
imaginative freedom appears undermined by Bourdieus alleged pessimistic
sociologism. Indeed, she accuses Bourdieu of mechanistic economism in the
form of base and superstructure hankerings: he construes a mimetic relation
between the linguistic and the social, rehabilitating the base/superstructure
model whereby the linguistic becomes epiphenomenal (Butler, 1997: 157).
Yet, surely Bourdieu cannot be accused of a crudely reductive base/super-
structure theory, when much of his theoretical life has been dedicated to explicitly
repudiating such a metaphor. He it is who has repeatedly stressed the subjective
force of classications and representations, not least in his famous article

What
Makes a Social Class

?

(1987a).

12

Were such constructions and images not so vital,
he would hardly have needed to theorize the dangerous utopian power of many
representations in art and literature (Bourdieu

et al

., 1985: 901). His own
discoveries have shown how universally available symbolic goods, like art, are
destined to end up as fetishes in the hands of the dominants rather than the
dominated. Such discoveries would lose their tragic point were such classications
not often a forgotten dimension of the class struggle (Bourdieu, 1984: 483).

13

Against Butler, I share Lovells view that her theory adopts the

other extreme

of a willed or voluntaristic defence of an open future (Lovell, 2000; 2003:
1213). Butlers position is thus vulnerable to criticisms similar to those made
by Bourdieu both of Sartres abstract notion of freedom and of Webers residual
heroism in his charisma concept

(Bourdieu, 1990a: 426, 51).

14

In Butlers
attempt to refute Bourdieus power-based view (1991) about who is authorized
to speak, she musters as exemplar the gure of Rosa Parks, whilst conveniently
forgetting that a drunk tramps declamations about injustice have no impact.
Indeed, sticking narrowly to some passages of the 1991 text, she disregards
Bourdieus earlier work on religious and secular prophets and the process of
social change (1987b). For there Bourdieu convincingly argues against explaining
prophets or charismatic gures (such as Parks) simply in terms of their individual
personalities, air for public speaking and the devotion of their followers
(Bourdieu, 1987b: 130). As Lovell so eloquently shows (2003), what is at stake
is a set of

political/ethical interests on the part of the subordinated population

, which



leads them to a quest for justice. Leaders such as Parks or later, the Mandelas
or Steve Biko were able to strip away the banalized elements of everyday
religious/political views (Bourdieu) so as to create new prophetic messages.
They could do so only because, as leading gures, they were

emblematic of the
groups own deepest aspirations

. Their own politically prophetic habitus has become
objectively attuned to the degraded and stigmatized character of the addressed
masses, allowing them the offering and decoding of concealed messages
(Bourdieu, 1987b: 131):
[T]he prophet embodies in exemplary conduct, or gives discursive expres-
sion to, representations, feelings and aspirations, that existed before his
arrival . . . (You would not have sought me if you had not already found
me). Thus the prophet that isolated individual, a man without a past,
lacking any authority, other than himself [. . .] may act as an organizing,
mobilizing force.
(1987: 130)
It is this symbiotic relationship between the prophet or masses which liberates
speech. The power that authorizes it is not just derived from the rites of
institutions, it is also offered by the group to its spokesperson (1991).
It is also true that Bourdieus writings on art and symbolic revolution reect
a wider disenchantment with vested interests. Such interests constitute so many
structural traps ready to undermine the process of active social transformation.
Similar suspicions can be turned to his arguments about ending masculine
domination. The fundamental aspect of this Bourdieusian theoretical insistence
is his recognition of the historical

fragility

(not

impossibility

) of the social earth-
quakes advocated in radical thought, not least the fragility of the alliances
envisaged within many progressive artistic works. Such alliances, while uniting
the strange bedfellows of Left intellectuals and ordinary workers, often do so on
the basis of vaguely dened ideals and good intentions rather than on close
mutual knowledge. In such symbolic appeals, as with feminism, he recognizes
the all-too-easy possibility of broader agendas being bypassed for the sake of
sectional interests.

Radical movements can come to express the resentments of
a specic group, such as the young and powerless from the dominant class. These
angry and restless youth nd, within the movements embrace, a way of legiti-
mating their own access to power, but in doing so, they desert their former allies.
The existence of multiple sources of contradiction, or conict, undoubtedly
make the effective combination of interests for long-term structural alterations
much more difcult (Bourdieu, 1988: 17880).
It is in just such striking terms that Bourdieus former doctoral student,
Sandrine Garcia (1994, 1999) has described the internal narrowing of French
feminism. It developed from an open, cross-class structure that depended on the
democracy of personal testimonial to a movement dominated by those with




4 7 9

cultural and social capital. She pointed powerfully to the key shifts by the late
1970s and 1980s that divorced it from practical, mass activity. Such moves
allowed certain key gures such as Antoinette Fouque the space to substitute
themselves for the wider movement by institutionalizing its activities, even
claiming proprietary rights over the right to use its name:

Mouvement de libration
des femmes

(MLF) (Garcia, 1994: 853).

15

By later casting lesbianism as an exem-
plary mark of excellence, the movement was closed from equal participation by
heterosexual women. Ultimately, its agenda was subtly switched from a loose,
broad-based organization to that of a research centre. The transition allowed a
minority within the womens movement to gain the maximum return on their
superior intellectual capital (Garcia, 1994: 8578, 1999: 341).

Gender and literature

It has already been noted that Bourdieus work was largely restricted to analysing
the

structural constants

of masculine domination. He never sufciently elaborated
on the different types of patriarchy and their connection

historically

with different
elds of power: feudal, agrarian capitalist and industrial capitalist, etc. Within
his specic research area of the cultural eld, he failed to explore how his crucial
conceptions of masculine/feminine honour

,

detailed in the work on Kabylia,
resurface again in the different terrain of a gendered Protestant ethic. Nor, in his
work on the literary eld,

did he address the strategic vehicle of the novel in
elaborating on the bourgeois Protestant critique of aristocratic gender divisions
and sexuality.
First, there is a long and distinguished set of studies that do this work, whose
approach, if not in every case inuenced by Bourdieu, is compatible with his
framework. Nancy Armstrong (1987) powerfully reveals that eighteenth and
nineteenth-century novels present a new discourse of (English) bourgeois
morality, a female language yet paradoxically, one typically written by men
which broke with the Latin-based educated register of the standard upper-class
form (Armstrong, 1987: 28). The popular genre crystallized in the gures of
Richardsons Pamela and Clarissa rather than Defoes Moll Flanders. The new ethos
took as its standpoint the naive subjectivity of the pure woman so as to mount a
critique not just of aristocratic conceptions of sexual chase and conquest, but
also of the entire aristocratic hierarchical order and sense of distinction.
Everyone acknowledges that in some sense the novel was bourgeois art: but
Armstrongs research argues innovatively that the symbolic revolution of these
novels helped to pave the way for the homo economicus of classical economic
theory:
it was the new domestic woman rather than her counterpart, the new
economic man who rst encroached upon aristocratic culture and seized
authority from it. [. . .] These authors portrayed aristocratic women [. . .]
as the very embodiments of corrupted desire [. . .]. The books all took care
to explain how this form of desire destroyed the very virtues essential to
wife and mother.
(Armstrong, 1987: 5960)
16
In his prioritization of the universals of gender domination, Bourdieu neglects
these more detailed analyses of social transformation.
Nor does Bourdieu, secondly, address adequately the eighteenth-century
genesis of the public sphere. Yet, once more, alongside its well-known experimenta-
tion with democratic forms (Sennett, 1986), the emergent public sphere had
undoubted signicance for gender relations. It is well known that the emancipatory
and universalistic rhetoric of the new public spaces was later undercut by the harsh
reality of property relations. What is less discussed is the gender effect of the initial
owering of this sphere of debate and criticism, in salons in which women, too,
were active intellectual participants. The celebration of salon society and, later,
club life, in no way presupposed or prioritized the domestic, family-based relations
of the conventional bourgeois ideal (Donzelot, 1980; Landes, 1988).
Thirdly, Bourdieus empirical studies acknowledge, but never fully explore
the effect on cultural production of the rigid gender divisions in the rst era of
the avant-garde. Using Bourdieus framework we can see in the advent of the
modernist public sphere, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a
gender division in the struggle for capital in the eld of cultural production, one
that results in the conversion of many popular and middlebrow genres into an
increasingly female terrain. Yet the exclusion of women from the public space of
modernist circles meant that some women writers of so-called middlebrow
ction possessed much greater education or cultural capital than was the case for
male middlebrow and popular writers (see Fowler, 1997: 13951). Such women
writers were impelled by their desire for a large readership to attend to some
features increasingly linked to older literary projects for example, they used
strong narrative structures or encode within their novels collective memories or
folk-history. Thus, they kept one foot in the popular camp. However, they also
felt free to experiment with elements of modernist technique, whilst taking as
their subjects new social and political issues (Maslen, 2001: 1116, ch. 1). In
brief, Bourdieu acknowledges, but never fully elucidates, the effect on cultural
production of the rigid gender divisions in the rst era of the avant-garde.
Education, late capitalism and womens entry to the workforce
I want now to raise certain traditional materialist questions that are not posed
in Masculine Domination, a book that treats womens oppression as analytically
independent of class and there is justication for reintroducing them. Bourdieu
has already linked together masculine economic strategies with feminine
RE ADI NG BOURDI E U S MA S CUL I NE D O MI NA T I O N 4 8 1
practices in the processes of converting economic into symbolic capital. These
are to be understood as a joint strategy for the maintenance of the position of the
(bourgeois) family overall (1998c: 70). It is in this light and especially the
bourgeois familys economic imperatives that I recall Sir Keith Josephs advice
to the Conservative Party in the 1970s that its members should not now oppose
the employment of women as workers, because they were in general docile and
non-unionized. I shall suggest, moreover, that we may have been so taken up
with womens subjective experience, including the pioneering shattering of glass
ceilings and the creation of new professional lifestyles, that we might have been
blind to other social facts.
In The State Nobility (1996a), Bourdieu begins to suggest a quite different
formulation of the new mode of reproduction of the last thirty years. Rather
than arranged marriage and dowries, he suggests, the dominant class has chosen
to invest in the education of its daughters, to adopt changed fertility patterns
and to benet by their earning potential (1996a: 2745, 2879). This does not
eliminate intra-class marriage; quite the contrary, the habitus operates to draw
together partners with the same experiences within the university or grande cole
and from the same backgrounds (1996a: 275). Women feature more promi-
nently than before at this level and in the preparatory classes for the grandes coles,
replacing the dominated class candidates in this respect (1996a: 195).
17
Bourdieus work has taught us to be imaginative with regard to interests in
education and especially to strategies of family advancement on the part of the
grande bourgeoisie. Now the family itself is a eld in which its members not only
aim to be disinterested towards one another but on many occasions actually are
disinterested. This creates an abiding problem for the classical homo economicus
view of agents solely maximizing economic interests as individuals (1998c: 79;
2001b:26). But, simultaneously, it is often the family which legitimates a strategy
of maximizing your capitals. It is not just a question of amassing economic capital
for this is a vulgar materialism (1996a: 5313) it is also useful to have in
your family a bishop or a polytechnicien, thus the acquisition of symbolic capital.
The entry of women into the upper sections of the labour market, especially the
higher professions or management, could be regarded as increasing your chances
of keeping or gaining more picture cards in your familys hand of cards:
One of the property of the dominants is to have families particularly
extended (the great have great families) and strongly integrated, because
united not just through the effects of the habitus, but also by the solidarity
of their interests, thats to say, at once by capital and for capital, economic
capital certainly, but also symbolic capital (the name) and above all,
perhaps, social capital (which one knows is both the condition for and the
consequence of the successful direction of capital on the part of the
members of this domestic unit).
(1998c: 70)
Ethnomethodology is to some degree correct in seeing the family as an illusion
and points to some indicators of meltdown in such a constructed social entity
(lone parents, etc.). Yet, there are also good sociological grounds for grasping
the structures of the esprit de famille, which are still highly resilient. Here he
points not just to the doxa in which to have a family is to normalize yourself
in the most basic status terms but also the crucial nature of the family as an arena
for State legitimation and for social reproduction of capitals, not least of course
the inheritance of economic property. In this sense, the family is an illusion, yes, but
a well-founded one (1998c: 66).
It is in this same objectivating mode that I note that we have been slow to
describe the class consequences of the increasing success of women as upwards
invaders of service class (dominant class) jobs. What if the situation in 2003
were the exact obverse of the state in 1969 when the question of sexual divisions
and difference [were pushed] to the periphery of the historical process (Alex-
ander, 1984: 127)? What if we have become so mesmerized by stories of womens
progress or its limits that we failed to notice the increasing polarization of class
inequalities going on behind our backs, and the indirect contribution of womens
work to this through the combining of high salaries at the service class level?
After all, Mike Savage et al. reveal that, in 1987, 61% of those families where
the highest salary levels had been obtained (at that time, over 20,000) were
those where there were dual service class incomes (Savage et al., 1992: 156).
18
Now
I am not arguing against equal pay or economic independence for women; I
neither want to reduce womens oppression to class, nor do I see any simple way
to relate this new information to programmes for reducing inequality. But these
facts indicate that the split in class experience has become much wider than in the
period from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. This applies to both sexes.
Working-class men are culturally more denigrated and rendered more abject
as a consequence of shifts in occupational structures and of bourgeois womens
move into the labour market. Working-class women, in turn, suffer from the
injuries of class, confounded by a fear of losing sexual respectability (Skeggs,
1997). Unlike their service-class sisters, they cannot throw off the double
burden of paid work and housework: The best of times [and] the worst of times
Johanna Brenner has remarked in relation to this recent class polarization of
women, and this seems to me to aptly characterize the situation (Brenner, 2000:
2335; see also Walby, 1997).
19
Perhaps disinterested concerns with the stakes of gender equality have
increasingly masked material interests. Paradoxically, this might be true even in
the area of so-called materialist feminism. By a sleight of hand, the material
can come to mean only the materiality of the signier, as in Butler.
20
But in
Britain at least it is probable that the bourgeoisie of the 1960s and 1970s came
to realize that it did not benet simply by using women to socialize the next
generation (Lovell, 1987: 13351).
21
It might also gain by utilizing their educa-
tional capital in the labour-market (Pickvance and Pickvance, 1994).
22
Certainly, there is considerable evidence in Britain of earlier, extensive
middle-class relative deprivation (1960s) that should also be introduced in
explaining the expansion of womens employment within management and the
professions. This needs to be related to domestic service. It is a familiar
paradox that in the heartland of wage-labour, nineteenth- century Britain, the
numbers in the industrial work force were eclipsed in size by the numbers of
domestic servants. Take 1851: the number of factory employees was 775, 534
while the number of female domestic servants alone amounted to more than a
million (Sayer, 1991: 49; Corrigan, 1977). Even Marx commented on this
paradox:
what a convenient arrangement it is which makes a factory girl sweat
twelve hours in a factory so that the factory proprietor with part of her
unpaid labour can take into his personal service her sister as maid, her
brother as groom and her cousin as soldier or policeman.
(1863, quoted in Sayer, 1991: 49)
In fact, between 1850 until 1880, British female workers in domestic service
were between 58% and 50% of the service sector and 40% (1850) of the entire
English female labour force. Even in 1850s France, where there were more
women in agriculture, there were still as many as 35% women workers in
services who were domestic servants (Tilly and Scott, 1978: 689, 72). The
twentieth century shows a sharply different pattern. With the rise in the number
of working-class women in industry and clerical work, the number of domestic
servants declined. By 1950, they were approximately 18% in Britain and as few
as 9% in France (see table in Tilly and Scott, 1978: 72).
Rereading Runcimans 1966 Relative Deprivation and Social Justice in the light
of this, we notice that the post-war settlement had, by 1962, produced a marked
decline in the levels of satisfaction of the middle class, a decline that seemed in
inverse relation to their perception of the considerable material improvements
gained by the working-class (Runciman, 1966: 89).
23
One small indicator of this
discontent, noted by Runciman himself, was the disappearance of domestic
servants, especially in the interwar and immediate post-war years (Runciman,
1966: 1079).
24
Indeed the language of alienation used by Oakley (1974) of
housework in the early 1970s might precisely be understood in the context of
the forced domestic labour of women traditionally freed from menial and repet-
itive duties.
In this context, it is telling to realize how many of the earlier domestic staff
are being reconstituted as an indirect result of the decisions of middle-class women
to work. Over one-third of the middle class now employ cleaners and domestic
child-care (Gregson and Lowe, 1995: 155).
25
Yet as recently as 1972 with
dazzling prophetic incompetence a premature death-notice for the nanny
appeared, entitled The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny: The nanny it claimed
evolved among the upper and uppermiddle classes during the Nineteenth
Century, ourished for approximately 80 years and then, with the second world
war, disappeared forever (Gathorne-Hardy, cited in Gregson and Lowe, 1994:
89).
In fact, the nanny was reborn, although stripped forever of the unfashionable
elitism of starched apron and uniform. Indeed, migrant workers make up a
growing proportion of nannies. Within the UK as in Athens, Barcelona, Berlin
and Paris the appearance of a signicant section of migrant domestic workers
has gone hand in hand with the increased female participation in the economy,
most seeking to ll the gaps that public provision of childcare does not provide.
The size of this group is impossible to determine because many of its workers
are undeclared. And, as Andersons recent study has argued, it is necessary to go
beyond the simple economic calculation that is made, although a prot is never
negligible when a Filipino worker can be paid 4 and hour and her female
barrister employer makes 250 an hour (Anderson, 2000: 112). Symbolic
prots are intertwined with the economic prots. While many migrant domestic
workers may feel they receive respect, many see that what is at stake is the
extensive and diffuse power of command that this wage-labour contract makes
possible. As Anderson observes, the contractual tie means: buying the power to
command, not the property in the person but the whole person. [At the polar
extreme] it is this same power of command that is manifest [. . .] in calling a
person dog and donkey [. . .] in making her clean the oor three times a day
(Anderson, 2000: 114).
It would be an irony if, in the name of emancipating women, the mental/
manual divide became more entrenched, so that the salaried women of the service
class controlled and exploited the menial or degraded labour of their sisters
(Brenner, 1993: 158; Anderson, 2000: 125). Yet, there are analogous historical
precedents. The growing nineteenth-century abundance of servants in house-
holds of a bourgeois nature rather than a feudal landowning class, reminds us
that a progressive industrialist class by no means always forged progressive
outcomes (Davidoff and Hall, 1987).
The conceptual lters through which we catch contemporary social reality
are often misleading, especially in describing the fractions of the dominant class.
For example, Savage et al., using Bourdieus concept of strategies, reasonably
conclude that there are differences in the experience and mental structures of
the higher professionals vis--vis the private employer or manager. They then go on to
express this as an ascetic lifestyle amongst professionals (Savage et al., 1992:
207). But they might interrogate further what Bourdieu calls the strategic
interest in disinterestedness on the part of this so-called ascetic professional
group (see Bourdieu, 1984: 2501). Unlike the more market-loving entrepre-
neurial middle class, professionals typically denigrate an openly consumerist
stance. Despite this rhetoric, their asceticism rarely means denying themselves
the dignity of large houses and gardens; the strange harvest of lucrative social
capital gleaned from the petty tortures of public schools; or the graciousness
afforded by the removal of menial chores.
26
Nor has the shift in the service class
as a whole left the so-called ascetic fraction unaffected. For there has been a
profound swing from the restrained body image and frugal existence, typied by
women such as Simone de Beauvoir (Moi, 1993), to the new lifestyle of women
adorned with power suits and Porsches. It is precisely this transition which is
encapsulated brilliantly in Bourdieus account of the rise of a new mandarin
stratum, with its distinctive body-culture (1996a: 21929). Might the claims for
the vindication of women also operate as a Trojan horse to legitimate the material
privileges of the dominants?
Determinism and reexivity
I want to nish by briey considering the debate over Bourdieus alleged deter-
minism (see, for example, Alexander, 1995). There are certainly some signicant
feminists who have seen Bourdieus sociology as drawing an illegitimate emphasis
on womens complicity with masculine domination (Armengaud, 1993:
878).
27
The issue of determinism is a crucial one in that it is in this arena that
Bourdieu has been consistently accused of underemphasizing the opportunities
for agency. Yet, Bourdieu always insisted that his theory of practice is not a theory
of total determination. In the last analysis, humans possess reexivity. Reexivity
is precisely the conscious, rational use of power to resist the various forms of
determination linked to the social colonization of the unconscious, from the
bodys little acts of routinized gender discipline, to the appeal of the martyr-
Madonna role. The debunking ethos of carnival and pub, the role of critique and
parody within the artistic sphere, and the force of a scientic socioanalysis all
gain their effectiveness from operating as aids to reexivity. They thus create vital
areas of indeterminacy where a logic of ux takes over and a more active,
path-breaking agency can take place. Historically, the role of unfrocked priests
and uprooted, plebeian intellectuals has been to serve as crucial conduits,
transmitting the marginalized ideas arising within the religious and academic
elds to the mass of the subordinate classes. Bourdieu also points to the perennial
place of comic popular culture, which serves to delegitimate ofcial power-
holders for example, in the period before the French revolution (Bourdieu
et al., 1985).
Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu, 2000) restates the view that agents possess
a margin of freedom. Resigned hopelessness can always be broken through in
a crisis, civilized routines can at least temporarily be cast aside. So there is
always a potential for the lack of a match between objective structures and
internal cognitive categories. In crises, in particular, there is a sudden nerve-
racking sense of openness. People now grasp the contingency of the future:
It would be wrong to suppose that the circle of expectations and chances
cannot be broken. [. . .] The lack of a future . . . is an increasingly wide-
spread, even a modal, experience. But there is the relative autonomy of
the symbolic order which in all circumstances, especially in periods where
expectations and chances fall out of line, can leave a margin for freedom
for political action aimed at reopening the space of the possibles.
(2000: 234ff.)
Bourdieu sometimes writes too strongly of womens love of their fate rather
than resigned accommodation, their feel for the game leading them to continue
their own domination. At the same time, he is always aware that there are women
who are lucid outsiders, whose own angle of vision allows them to break with
the habitus of the powerless female, at whatever cost. Thus unlike functionalists
whose model of socialized conformity is of a serene maintenance of the social
order Bourdieus conception of powerlessness is permeated with contradic-
tion. At its most acute, as for the chronic unemployed of the sub-proletariat, an
extreme sense of the lack of self-justication emerges, analogous to the aware-
ness of growing unjustiability which affected Joseph K as he went to his death
in The Trial. Bourdieu compares this penal sentence that the social world inicts
imperiously on individuals to the terrible punishments that the faithful see as
inicted by God (Bourdieu, 2000: 245).
Conclusion
Bourdieus theories are realist in that they force us to understand the difculties
of change, including, in the sphere of gender, the collusion of some women (cf
Krais, 1993). I have argued above that we need to examine closely what he
teaches us about the interaction of gender and material interests. However, if his
magnum opus, Distinction, offers a classically disenchanted portrayal of the post-
Keynesian mode of reproduction, with its fracturing of the petty-bourgeoisie and
its increased allure of consumption, his very late works are written with a greater
sense of political urgency.
28
These derive from his own prophetic, even polem-
ical, intervention against neo-liberalism. In such works, he returns to the idea
of a rational utopian alternative in order to challenge what he calls the bankers
economic realism, which thinks it knows better than the people what is good
for them (1998b: 26). He thus helped found a movement (tats Gnraux) of
oppositional forces that might undertake the necessary work of challenge and
confrontation in order to prevent the return of barbarism (1998b: 52). Such a
reference to the assembly of the Estates General inevitably recalls, at least for
the French, the events prior to the French Revolution. The historical experience
of women prompts them to join in becoming active agents of such a transforma-
tion, especially given Bourdieus warnings about ways in which patriarchal
societies might be rationalized in the interests of domination. Under such new
structures, women, especially, might nd themselves increasingly the possessors
of a precarious work habitus.
Before his death in January 2002, Bourdieu was in an embattled position in
France. His books had become bestsellers even turned into theatre but his
own position was being challenged. Indeed, this sometimes even took the form
of charges of intellectual terrorism (Le Monde, 27 August 1998 and Libration 28
August 1998). Verds-Leroux, for example, in a swingeing, but singularly unper-
suasive attack, denigrated Bourdieu for a whole slate of faults. She accuses him
of being the leader of a cult, of using statistical ndings unrelated to his textual
empirical descriptions (2000: 110) and of proposing a fantasized view of the
world in which those from the dominated class are held to feel unworthy (sic)
(2000: 51). In brief, Bourdieu was claimed to have substituted political philos-
ophy for scientic sociology (2000: 57).
However, in France too, there had developed around Bourdieu not just a
strong team of collaborators, but increasing interest in his work in other disci-
plines, especially among philosophers. Thus by the time of his funeral, Le Monde
had registered the importance of his death on its front page and had featured
several obituaries. In public terms, he had become an important political intel-
lectual in the lineage of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Internationally, Bourdieu had
achieved a recognition as possibly the single most signicant social scientist of
the turn of the millennium, and one who had enormous impact not just on
sociology but on elds as far as art history and museumology. Given both his
reputation and the internal rigour of his works, it is my view that we should best
defend his achievements by putting his theories to work in fresh ways, yet always,
of course, with a critical gaze.
Notes
1 Kabylia, in the Southern part of Algeria, is the region in which Bourdieu
undertook most of his Algerian ethnographic work in the 1950s and 1960s. A
naturally poor area, with little social differentiation, it plays for him a similar
place vis--vis the metropolis, Algiers, to the peripheral position of his own
childhood peasant region in the Pyrenees, Barn, vis--vis Paris.
2 The phrase is Terry Lovells see Lovell (1990).
3 Thus, akin to Sylvia Walby, Bourdieu suggests that there have been shifts
between private and public patriarchy. However, cutting across her classi-
cation, he identies a continued public and State-registered gendering of
activities, such as military service, which has persisted into the twentieth
century and which has been associated particularly with modern nationalist
and authoritarian regimes (2001a: 87). His earlier work resonates with depic-
tions of Kabylean women, which includes points of divergence from the
Western bourgeois canonical pattern. Thus the Kabylean cultural ethos cele-
brates womens capacity for productive labour, separating this form of patri-
archy and that of the peasant French Barn from nineteenth-century
middle-class womens conspicuous leisure.
4 It is clear from Bourdieus general theoretical orientation in Distinction (1984)
and from his rst Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales article on Masculine
Domination (1990b), that he has a marked familiarity with the major French
feminist writings. This is apparent, for example, in his 1990 references to
Irigaray, Cisoux and other inuential gures. There has been considerable
controversy about why he has not quoted their works more (see note 27). One
factor is undoubtedly his reluctance to use citation as a mode of authorizing
his own thought. Another is his stated predilection for detailed ethnographic
or historical studies of patriarchy, rather than the more conventionally-
prestigious conclusions of theory. Theory is observed to be in danger of
eclipsing phenomenological analysis in a typically masculine manner
(Bourdieu, 2001a: 98n).
5 Bourdieu recalls a similar division of labour in the Barn, where it is the men
who undertake the dramatic act of pig-sticking, spending a leisurely day
afterwards relaxing with cards, whereas the women are endlessly busy
preparing the sausages, black pudding and pats (2001a: 301).
6 The signicance of the exclusion of women from the martial arts lies
precisely in their exclusion from the supreme sacrice of individual death for
the collectivity. Historically, it is this gender division which has been so
signicant in legitimating masculine power and which was so conspicuously
absent in the relatively peaceful democracies of post-World War II Europe until
the 1990s. On the percipience of warnings from both Serbian and Croat
alliances of women about the dangers of militarised nationalisms, prior to the
Bosnian and Kosovo conicts, see Enloe (1993: 24850).
7 Bourdieus concern for the sociological and anthropological analysis of the
body places him in the traditions of Durkheim, Hertz and Merleau-Ponty. The
body has been read as the site of social representations in the work of Brian
Turner, who has stressed especially the control of the female body through
medieval exercises in asceticism and (with different cosmological signicance)
bourgeois womens hysteria and use of corsetry (see Turner, 1996). But
perhaps the most important historical exposition of the profound impact of
different world-visions on the body is proposed by Ferguson: see especially his
contrast between the early bourgeois sense of the body as a hermetically-sealed
container impermeable to outside inuence, and the late bourgeois or modern
sense of the body as delicately exposed like laments of an electric bulb
(Ferguson, 1997). It goes without saying that Bourdieus similar break with
the mind-body dualism inherent in the Cartesian project is a welcome
development. Bourdieus conception of the human body, which is itself
substantially formed by society in the mind, gives his modelling of gender
divisions a depth that Turner never quite achieves. It owes much to the
sociological interpretations of court society proposed by Elias, not least
through the latters sensitivity to the telling detail, such as in his account of
the seventeenth century development of carefully-schooled practices which
inaugurated the pacication of the military aristocracy. Such dispositions were
accomplished, for example, via the conspicuous gesture of peaceful intentions
by the dofng of caps, thus indicating the absence of concealed weapons.
8 Bourdieu has paid homage to the work of Erving Goffman, and in so doing,
marked himself off from many of his French colleagues. Goffmans stress on
the bodily signs (tie signs in the couple, etc.) that betray the state of inner
relationships (Relations in Public) and on the discipline of the body to display
regulated gender, as in his prophetic Gender Advertisements, reveal the extraor-
dinary parallels between his distinctive brand of symbolic interactionist struc-
turalism and that of Bourdieus theory of practice.
9 See especially Bourdieus Le Mort et le Vif (1980b), which assesses the nature of
reication in history and which quotes specically from Eliass historical
sociology.
10 It would be wrong to conclude from this, however, that those men with other
stakes to command, such as professional men, are therefore totally immune
from the unconscious and emotional dispositions laid down in the code of
masculinity. Gynaecologists as well as unskilled labourers have been found
amongst wife-beaters.
11 Following Mauss, Bourdieu sees the exchange of gifts or services as a pervasive
form of social life, especially common in undifferentiated societies without
commodities. Here giving obliges the one who has received a gift to return it.
Bourdieu points out that the interest in the return-gift is usually veiled or mis-
recognized by the giver because of the gap in time separating acceptance from
subsequent gift giving.
12 Bourdieus tactic in this article is to argue that a social class has two elements.
On the one hand, there is a greater disposition to join a subordinate class when
actors are lacking the major forms of capital economic, symbolic and social.
Such objective afnities create a common predisposition to perceive the world
in the same way. However, to crystallize practices in the form of communal,
class-based actions, representations of classes as having causally-powerful collec-
tive status must also be generated. They will typically compete for attracting
loyalty with other subjective representations: those of the nation, religion,
race etc. In this sense, class is merely one competing conception in a wider
struggle over classications.
13 We look in vain for any extended analysis in Bourdieu of contemporary
cultural works that might, in the broadest sense, function as weapons for
transformation. The exception is his assessment of Hans Haackes conceptual
art (see Bourdieu and Haacke, 1995).
14 Bourdieu notes that Butler seems herself to have given up her earlier view that
gender transformation is similar to putting on a new set of clothes, citing her
disavowal of this in Bodies that Matter (Bourdieu, 2001a: 103n).
15 Garcia points out that in 1979 Antoinette Fouque registered the MLF and two
dozen similar names under the National Institute for Industrial Property, so
that it was hard to use them unless one was from the Antoinette Group
(Garcia, 1994: 8523).
16 Armstrongs weakness is one she shares with other Foucauldians: she eliminates
any elements of dissidence, discord and tension within such discourses.
17 In Bourdieus view, the increasing number of titles (cultural capital) possessed
by all the heirs of the dominant class girls as well as boys together with
the political pressure to give a number of titles to non-heirs, creates a tendency
to overproduction, from which working-class title-holders suffer (1996a: 287).
This, however, is a contested position.
18 It is precisely in the upper sections of the service class (or, in French terms,
the State nobility or haute bourgeoisie), where rewards from single salaries
alone are upwards of 100,000, that the full impact of the dual income is most
apparent.
19 Although, in relation to the dominant class, working-class masculinity has
become more abject as the last refuge of machismo, ethnographic study
shows that working-class women continue to experience their femininity as a
burdensome responsibility (Skeggs, 1997).
20 Skeggs again points out that class has almost disappeared from feminist anal-
yses, even those claiming a materialist feminist position (1997: 6).
21 This is a shorthand for a variety of different class fractions that occupy a
position of superiority as regards control over, and appropriation of, resources
on the market.
22 This research emphasises numerous strategies in realizing aspirations for
housing such as delays in having children, acceptance of certain undesirable
types of work, etc. The authors restrict their analysis to conscious decisions,
although they accept that it would be possible also to include unconscious
strategies based on cultural transmission. Bourdieus concept of habitus allows
us to dispense with this dichotomy. It should be noted that the above research
did not study the service class (or grande bourgeoisie) specically, although it
does distinguish between manual workers options (e.g. staying in the parental
home longer than liked) and middle-class options (e.g. moving together earlier
than planned) (1994: 671).
23 Runciman notes that the improvements of the manual working class did not
end the poverty of 5% of the whole population and was compatible with the
top 10% owning 79% of the wealth (1954) (Runciman, 1966: 87, 89). He
states the signicance of middle-class responses in these terms:
Given this general belief, and what was certainly an advance on the part
of manual workers, there is nothing surprising in the resentments voiced
by members of the middle classes. The knowledge that manual workers,
however few, could now earn upwards of 20 a week and be the posses-
sors not merely of television sets but of motor cars, was enough by itself
to exacerbate their fears of a decline in terms of traditional middle-class
standards.
(1966: 89)
24 [T]he working-class might not feel themselves to be the equal of the rich but
they did not feel themselves to be their servants either (Runciman, 1966:
109).
25 They remark that the fact that [O]ver a third of middle-class households
employ domestic waged labour in some form or another seems to testify both
to the crisis in daily social reproduction within middle-class households in
Britain and to the reconstitution of domestic work within such households
(1995: 155). They also point out to the class implications of the changes:
Such observations suggest that we may be witnessing the collapse of the
post-war association in Britain between all women and all domestic tasks.
Indeed, our research provides evidence for - the transfer of the dirtiest,
heaviest and most physically-demanding and/or labour-intensive tasks to
working-class women . . . a class-mediated hierarchy of domestic tasks
is once more being constructed.
(1995:159)
I would agree with these remarks, although it is of course an empirical
question as to whether working-class womens experience of work in the
commercialized service or production sectors is more favourable than that of
paid domestic labour, while there are at the margins, a diversity of personality
patterns and needs. In case this argument appears to be unduly hostile to the
employment of domestic child-carers, it has to be stated that the deciencies
of public facilities have often made this decision a necessity for (middle-class)
working women.
26 I mean by social capital here, access to job networks, referees and professional
clients.
27 Armengaud also condemns Bourdieus Distinction and the Actes article on La
Domination Masculine for appropriating, without citation, the work of many
French feminist scholars. Possibly so, but a more likely explanation is
Bourdieus concern to distance his scholarly work from some of the practices
current in French philosophy and social science for example in some of
Kristevas work which have permitted the spurious, or even meaningless,
inclusion of references to formal logic, mathematical theory and theoretical
physics. It might be noted here that Bourdieu along with other French
scholars are thanked by two recent authors for their support in criticizing
such sometimes spectacular misuses (Sokal and Bricmont, 1998: xiii ).
28 At the risk of comparing dissimilar histories, I would argue that there is a
parallel between the disenchantment typical of the mentalit of the baroque
and the disillusionment of Distinction (and other contemporary texts) as they
depict the baroque stage of late capitalism, a development of the market
analogous to the seventeenth century Spanish monarchs instrumental use of
mass culture (Maravall, 1985).
References
Alexander, Jeffrey (1995) Fin de Sicle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the
Problem of Reason. London: Verso.
Alexander, Sally (1984) Women, class and sexual differences in the 1830s and
1840s: some reections on the writing of a feminist history. History Workshop
Journal, 18: 12549.
Anderson, Bridget (2000) Doing the Dirty Work: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour.
London: Zed.
Armengaud, Francoise (1993) Pierre Bourdieu: Grand Temoin? Nouvelles Questions
Feministes, 14(3): 838.
Armstrong, Nancy (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
(1980a) Le Sens Pratique. Paris: Minuit.
(1980b) Le Mort Saisit Le Vif. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales,
323(April June): 314.
(1984) Distinction. London: Routledge.
(1987a) What makes a social class? On the theoretical and practical existence
of groups. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 32: 117.
(1987b) Legitimation and structured interests. In S. Lash and S. Whimster
(eds), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London: Allen and Unwin.
(1988) Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity.
(1990a) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity.
(1990b) La domination masculine. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 84:
231.
(1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity.
(1993a) The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity.
(1993b) La Misre du Monde. Paris: Seuil.
(1993c) Sociology in Question. London: Sage.
(1996a) The State Nobility. Cambridge: Polity.
(1996b) The Rules of Art. Cambridge: Polity.
(1997) Mditations Pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil.
(1998a) La Domination Masculine. Paris: Seuil.
(1998b) Acts of Resistance. Cambridge: Polity.
(1998c) Practical Reason. Cambridge: Polity.
(2000) Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity.
(2001a) Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity.
(2001b) Les Structures Sociales de lEconomie. Paris: Seuil.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Chartier, R. and Darnton, R. (1985) Dialogue A Propos de
lHistoire Culturelle. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 59: 8693.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Haacke, H. (1995) Free Exchange. Cambridge: Polity.
Brenner, Johanna (1993) The best of times, the worst of times: US feminism today.
New Left Review, 200(July-August): 10160.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:
Routledge.
(1993) Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge.
(1997) Excitable Speech. London: Routledge.
Corrigan, Philip (1977) Feudal relics or capitalist monuments? Sociology, 11(3):
45363.
Davidoff, L.and Hall, C. (1987) Family Fortunes. London: Hutchinson.
Donzelot, Jacques (1980) The Policing of Families. London: Hutchinson.
Enloe, Cynthia (1993) The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ferguson, Harvie (1997) Me and my shadows: on the accumulation of body-images
in Western society, parts 1 and 2. Body & Society, 3(3: 131) and 3(4: 131).
Fowler, Bridget (1997) Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory. London: Sage.
Garcia, Sandrine (1994) Project for a symbolic revolution: the rise and fall of the
womens movement in France. South Atlantic Quarterly, 93(4): 82570.
(1999) The stolen work. In P. Bourdieu (ed.) The Weight of the World.
Cambridge: Polity, 33853.
Gregson, N. and Lowe, M. (1994) Servicing the Middle Classes: class, gender and waged
domestic labour in contemporary Britain. London: Routledge.
(1995) Too much work? Class, gender and the reconstitution of middle-class
labour. In T. Butler and M. Savage (eds) Social Change and the Middle Classes.
London: UCL Press, 14865.
Grignon, C. and Passeron, J.-C. (1989) Le Savant et le Populaire. Paris: Seuil.
Krais, Beate (1993) Gender and symbolic violence. In C. Calhoun, E. Lipuma and
M. Postone (eds) Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity, 15677.
Landes, Joan (1988) Women and the Public Sphere. Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univer-
sity Press.
Lane, Jeremy (2000) Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto.
Lovell, Terry (1987) Consuming Fiction. London: Verso.
(ed.) (1990) British Feminist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell.
(2000) Thinking feminism with and against Bourdieu. In B. Fowler (ed.)
Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2748.
(2003) Resisting with authority. Theory Culture & Society, 20(1): 117.
Maravall, Jose (1985) Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Maslen, Elizabeth (2001) Political and Social Issues in British Womens Fiction, 192868.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
McNay, Lois (2000) Gender and Agency: Reconguring the Subject in Feminist and Social
Theory. Cambridge: Polity.
Moi, Toril (1993) Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Oakley, Ann (1974) The Sociology of Housework. London: Martin Robertson.
Pickvance, C. and Pickvance, K. (1994) Towards a strategic approach in housing
behaviour. Sociology, 28(3): 65777.
Runciman, Walter (1966) Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. London: RKP.
Savage, M., Barlow, J., Dickens, P. and Fielding, T. (1992) Property, Bureaucracy and
Culture. London: Routledge.
Sayer, Derek (1991) Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber. London:
Routledge.
Scott, Joan W. (1987) LOuvriere! Mot Impie, Sordide! Discourses of political
economy on womens work. In Patrick Joyce (ed.) The Historical Meanings of
Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 119143.
Sennett, Richard (1996) The Fall of Public Man. London: Faber.
Sintomer, Yves (1996) The corporatism of the universal and the city. Actuel Marx,
20: 91104.
Skeggs, Beverley (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage.
Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J.(1998) Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers Abuse
of Science. London: Prole.
Tilly, L. and Scott, J. W. (1978) Women, Work and the Family. London: Longmans.
Turner, Bryan S. (1996) The Body and Society. London: Sage.
Verds-Leroux, Jeannine (1998) Le Savant et La Politique: essai sur le terrorisme soci-
ologique de Pierre Bourdieu. Paris: Grasset.
Walby, Sylvia (1990) Theorising Patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell.
(1997) Gender Transformations. London: Routledge.
Witz, Anne (1992) Professions and Patriarchy. London: Routledge.

Bourdieu - Dominacion Masculin - Notas

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Исходное описание:

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Bourdieu - Dominacion Masculin - Notas

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

CULTURAL STUDI ES 1 7 ( 3 / 4 ) 2 0 0 3 , 4 6 8 4 9 4

Вам также может понравиться