Subject: Re: More questions on 'capital'
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 15:07:06 +1030


> I'm am also interested in this question, but I really haven't read
> _Masculine Domination_ (and it's not available in the library system where
I
> stay), so could you elaborate a little bit more on (how you perceive) this
> concept?

Torgeir, here goes nothing. I apologize to those who don't care for my take
on Bourdieu's Masculine Domination.

Bourdieu's project in "Masculine Domination Revisited" (1996-97 Berkeley
Journal of Sociology 41: 189-203) is to outline an account of systematic
gender domination through uncovering unconscious schemata of perception and
action; aiming to provide an account of the relations of masculine
domination through an analysis of symbolic order and meaning so as to enable
an understanding of the mental and social structures that are our means of
perception and action. He regards sexual differences as being inserted
within systems of oppositions that constitute a generative framework, as an
elementary organizing principle. The seemingly objective gender divisions
are considered as inscribed in the social order of things, as an unconscious
interpretive paradigm. The elementary division, the dualism of male/female,
is used as the basis for making distinctions and through analogy and
homology other distinctions, other dualisms, are imbued with and ascribed
the character, meaning and value of masculine/feminine. These binary
oppositions appear everywhere supported by, and supportive of, the dualism
masculine/feminine, seeming to correspond with the natural order of things.
The socially constructed body becomes a reference point for the ideological
foundation and legitimization of domination which is thereby naturalized.
The social and symbolic construction of biological sex serves as a basis for
perception and understanding of the world and within this is a relation of
domination. Here we are presented with an example of Bourdieu's notion of
'symbolic violence'; the imposition of systems of symbolic forms and
meanings upon a group of people in such a way that these systems are
experienced, misrecognized, as legitimate. This imposition of systems of
symbols is achieved through a misrecognition of the meaning and
ascribed/embodied power relations which are taken as real and legitimate.
Men and women are thus seen to construct their social world with forms and
categories but through an acquired system of generative schemes that are
internalized as second nature. People are, generally, thereby not conscious
of the underlying relations of domination which they collude in reinforcing
and reproducing (despite his paper being an example to the contrary?).

In 'An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology' (1992) Wacquant writes that in the
article 'Male Domination'(1990)  Bourdieu argues that 'gender domination
constitutes the paradigm of all domination and is perhaps its most
persistent form. It is at once the most arbitrary and the most misrecognized
dimension of domination because it operates essentially via deep, yet
immediate, agreement of embodied schemata of vision of the world with the
existing structures of that world, an agreement whose original roots go back
thousands of years and can be found in the exclusion of women from the games
of symbolic capital." (p. 134 n.88)

Justin.

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