Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 16:06:02 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: Re: Mastery/androcentrism in Bourdieu


On Sun, 16 Nov 1997, Gabriel Ash wrote:

> to sum up. I think the main problem articulated in this discussion is this. 
Bourdieu's theory is basically a theory of conflict, it sees conflict as the 
most basic fact of social life and explains everything, including cooperation,
functionality, order, etc.,  as the product of conflict. It also explain 
gender in that way, but if one takes femininty to be less conflict
oriented (competitive) than masculinity, it follows from B. that femininity 
is secondary and can be explained as produced from exclusions from 
masculinity. I.e. femininity becomes a form of alienation. 
> How do we escape this valorization of the masculine?

As I understand it (and I could be wrong) Bourdieu's notion of conflict is
not suprahistorical or somehow outside of history (a kind of Natural
History or biologic doom of the human race, as it were) but is intensely
critical of such, and basically points out that this competition is the
essence of capitalist society. This is a neat move, because previous
French thinkers -- e.g. Sartre -- made much of scarcity and the violence
of scarcity, but never fleshed this out in a really practical way.
Bourdieu's point is that it isn't the ontological whatness of the Ego
which creates conflicts, but rather the collective social
antagonisms of capitalism which creates the necessity to manage or
symbolically negate that scarcity by means of political spaces, games,
etc. No market can function without rules governing exchange, an organized
money-system, etc. And identities are also market constructs: masculinity
has to be "valorized", models of such are produced, bought and sold via
the mass media. Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't an aberration, but literally
and figuratively embodied Thatcherism: the cyborg entrepreneur, gunning
down competitors in a Darwinian struggle for mastery, who requires this
massive supply of (feminized, bleeding, de-masculinized) victims in a
weird kind of euphoric sacrifice to the global might and power of Silicon
capitalism. Which then necessitates the production of evil villains, who
are somehow outside of the system altogether: i.e. the alien
lobster-morpher in "Predator", or the Mercury Kid in "Terminator 2", who 
seem to have some grasp of information technology, and have the ability to
kick even cyborgs around (embryonic Bill Gateses and Larry Ellisons, as it
were).  

So Bourdieu's point has this very wide relevance; it's
not just a question of challenging male vs. female gender ideologies, but
of rebelling against and transforming a whole set of interlocking,
interrelated identity-constructs: white vs. black, European vs. African,
First World vs. 3rd, straight vs. gay/lesbian, young vs. old, rich vs.
poor. In that sense, maybe the only real escape from the aporia of gender
is solidarity (on every possible political, cultural and social level)
with all these other struggles. 

-- Dennis

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