Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (12 page)

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social construction
,
normativity
,
and difference

My overall argument is that political theorists in general, and liberal political theorists in particular, should take greater account of social construction. However, I also wish to argue that an awareness of social construction should not lead theorists to retreat to cultural relativism and the abandonment of universal normative principles. In contrast to some communitarian theories that argue that the cultural construction of individuals requires the protection of cultures and the perpetuation of patterns of construction, I claim that an awareness of social con- struction actually prompts an even
more
questioning attitude toward social or group norms than liberals typically have.

This combination may seem distinctly unpromising. In the previous two chapters I discussed the work of three radical theorists of social construction: Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Catharine Mac- Kinnon. In Chapter 1, I argued that one of the most problematic ele- ments of Foucault’s work is his lack of normative resources, and in this chapter I argue that the same problem affects Bourdieu, despite his focus on the normative-sounding ‘‘masculine domination.’’ Of the three theorists, only MacKinnon has an approach that sustains rigor- ous and radical critique; as I suggested in the introduction, feminists are more used to combining an analysis of social construction with a critique of the process. However, even MacKinnon claims that her analysis is ‘‘moral or ideal in neither basis nor purpose. It shows that women are a political group—oppressed, subordinated, and unequal— and explores the contours and implications of that reality for theory and politics and law. That reality established, anyone is welcome to defend or contest it.’’
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In this chapter I consider some of the problems of contesting the social construction of gender, along with some femi- nist and other strategies for overcoming those problems.

1. MacKinnon, ‘‘‘The Case’ Responds,’’ 710.
   

   Normativity
   

   In the previous chapter I outlined Bourdieu’s strategies for change, and highlighted some of their problems. The issue of normativity is problematic in Bourdieu’s work more generally, since his analysis leaves open the question of the extent to which any particular habitus is desirable. For Bourdieu, the habitus is inevitable, in that it is a re- sponse to objective social conditions. In this sense, it is not open to normative analysis. Individuals have the habitus appropriate to their social condition. However, as liberal egalitarian theory makes clear, we can evaluate the justice of alternative social arrangements. If a society is organized systematically to benefit some people at the expense of others, the resulting habituses will transmit that injustice. We can therefore say that, although the habitus represents an appropriate re- sponse to the objective conditions, if the conditions are unjust then the habitus is the embodiment of injustice.
   

   Bourdieu’s account itself, however, lacks normative resources. Al- though Bourdieu uses evocative normative terms, ‘‘domination’’ and ‘‘violence,’’ he does not provide the necessary normative framework to render those terms meaningful. As such, his work could be used for either reaction or revolution. A reactionary approach to Bourdieu’s ac- count of symbolic violence could begin with the fact that, for Bourdieu, the habitus is an inevitable and in some senses rational response to the conditions that confront it—even if those conditions have the char- acteristics of symbolic violence. A woman’s desire to undergo female genital mutilation (
   fgm
   ) or to practice it on her daughter, for example, is not the irrational desire of a false consciousness. It is a rational response to the patriarchal society in which she lives, in the sense that it might well be true that a woman is marriageable only if mutilated. Given this fact, the reactionary response might continue, isn’t it best to allow individuals to adapt to the norms that govern their lives as best they can? Don’t we help women most by letting them practice
   fgm
   and reap the rewards? Don’t we limit a woman’s chances if we prevent her from participating in a practice that, in her society, is the best way to secure advantage? If the habitus is the rational response to the prevailing conditions, why seek to change it?
   

   The second line of argument open to the reactionary follower of Bourdieu is the observation that, under systems of symbolic violence, both women and men are equally compliant. Moreover, Bourdieu ex-
   

   plicitly rejects the notion that men exercise influence over women to get them to conform to patriarchal norms. Instead, both men and women accept those norms at an unconscious level.
   2
   Men, then, are not the evil perpetrators of patriarchy. They too accept its dictates as obvious and natural. In other words, they too are subject to the sym- bolic violence. If patriarchal norms are imposed on and accepted by both women and men, in what sense can they be described as unjust? This reactionary thought is often expressed by the assertion that men also suffer under patriarchy: they must endure the responsibilities of breadwinning; maintaining a healthy, strong physique; daily shaving; not surrendering to the urge to cry in times of distress; and so on. The fact that there are different norms for different genders does not mean that men are free and women constrained. Instead, as Bourdieu him- self asserts, ‘‘Men are also prisoners, and insidiously victims, of the dominant representation.’’
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   Bourdieu’s theory has limited resources for condemning some con- figurations of habitus as worse than others, as normatively undesirable in terms of justice. His use of the terms ‘‘domination’’ and ‘‘violence’’ certainly implies that he does not view the habitus as a neutral way of being but rather wants to condemn certain social arrangements and the identities that result from them as in some way unjust or oppres- sive. However, his use of those terms is ambiguous. If symbolic vio- lence is gentle, imperceptible, and ubiquitous, there may not be much wrong with it. ‘‘Violence’’ for Bourdieu looks more like ‘‘influence’’ in the lay sense, and influence can be benign. Bourdieu does insist ‘‘I never talk of influence’’—rather, for him, people’s minds are ‘‘
   con- structed according to cognitive structures that are issued out of the very struc- tures of the world
   .’’
   4
   But this account exacerbates the problem. If sym- bolic violence does not destroy or harm a preexisting consciousness but
   constructs
   that consciousness, it is even harder to criticize. Symbolic violence does not harm us, or damage us; the gendered habitus does not control us, or dominate us; rather, symbolic violence and the gen- dered habitus constitute us,
   are
   us. We might wish we had been differ- ently constituted, but why should we? What, from within a gendered habitus, is objectionable about it? If social space ‘‘
   commands
   the repre-
   

2. Bourdieu and Wacquant,
   Invitation to Reflexive Sociology,
   168.
   

3. Bourdieu,
   Masculine Domination,
   49.
   

4. Bourdieu and Wacquant,
   Invitation to Reflexive Sociology,
   168; emphasis in the original.
   

   sentations that the social agents can have of it,’’
   5
   from where do agents derive the means to criticize that space or those representations?
   

   Perhaps the problem for Bourdieu is that we are
   dominated.
   But the term ‘‘domination’’ is not much more fruitful as a normative signifier. Iris Marion Young gives two reasons why domination is unjust: first, it deprives people of a kind of control over their lives which they ought to have; and second, by implication it deprives some people of this control more than others.
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   Young’s approach is all about the ways in which some people dominate others, such that there is an inequality of power. If we start with the liberal presumption that inequality is bad, then we have two reasons to dislike domination.
   

   However, a liberal critique of domination such as Young’s will not work for Bourdieu, since he does not believe that anyone can deter- mine their actions, much less the conditions of their actions. Although he does believe that the habitus can change, we have seen that the opportunities for change are limited. His discussion of symbolic vio- lence, in particular, plays down the options open to people. Domina- tion cannot be problematic, then, because it is a special case in which individuals cannot determine their actions or their conditions, as the condition of humans is ever thus.
   

   Moreover, Bourdieu agrees with the second reactionary response outlined above: that all are subject to structures of patriarchy. Not only are men subject to patriarchal norms, for Bourdieu, they are ‘‘victims’’ of them. In other words, men neither benefit from patriarchy nor play a part in influencing women to submit to it. In what sense, then, do men or masculinity
   dominate?
   Indeed, although it is clear that, for Bourdieu, women are the dominated and men (by inference) are the dominant,
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   in
   Practical Reason
   he implies that the term ‘‘masculine domination’’ is not meant to refer to domination of or by men, but rather to a general system of domination which applies to everybody but which is structured in terms of norms of masculinity.
   8
   Men, though they are the dominant actors in masculine domination, are nonetheless dominated by it, in the sense that they too must endure its restrictions. But if the normative sense of ‘‘domination’’ in systems of masculine domination refers merely to the domination of social
   

5. Bourdieu,
   Practical Reason
   , 13; emphasis added.
   

6. Iris Marion Young,
   Justice and the Politics of Difference
   , 31.
   

7. Bourdieu and Wacquant,
   Invitation to Reflexive Sociology,
   171.
   

8. Bourdieu,
   Practical Reason
   , 34.
   

   norms and structures, and not to a power imbalance or inequality be- tween those individuals who are subjected to the structures, we have little reason to work to overcome systems of domination. For any sub- sequent set of social norms would also be a system of domination, as it too would place constraints on social actors. Bourdieu’s account is insufficient as it stands to give us any normative reason to limit domi- nation or the ‘‘inferior’’ status of women. Liberal and feminist concepts of justice and equality are invaluable in this regard.
   

   Judith Butler highlights the problems that we must face if we wish to combine a strong account of social construction with normative fem- inist critique. Like Bourdieu, Butler argues that ‘‘power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic.’’
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   This does not mean, for Butler, that there can be no criticism. Rather, it means that criticism must take as its starting point its position within the social and political context it criticizes, and must not portray its own foundations as given, unques- tionable, or universal. In making this argument, Butler asks a question that strikes at the heart of many variants of liberalism. She asks, ‘‘Are these ‘foundations,’ that is, those premises that function as authorizing grounds, are they themselves not constituted through exclusions which, taken into account, expose the foundational premise as a contin- gent and contestable presumption?’’
   10
   The target of this challenge could be political liberalism, with its exclusion of ‘‘unreasonable’’ peo- ple and ‘‘indecent’’ cultures from deliberation about the supposedly common, consensual good. Liberal political institutions are supposed to be justified by the fact that they are universally assented to. Consen- sus is, for the political liberal, one of ‘‘the premises which function as authorizing grounds.’’ But, as Butler insists and as I argued in the introduction, the consensus is constructed by excluding those who would disagree if they were included. It is very easy to reach consensus if you exclude beforehand all those who would disagree.
   

   Political liberalism falls foul of this problem because, in its attempt to cast itself as an unimposed, tolerant doctrine that can be the product of an overlapping consensus, it obscures the extent to which its own foundations are substantive and particular. Butler’s critique suggests that liberalism might do better to embrace its particularism than to try
   

9. Judith Butler, ‘‘Contingent Foundations,’’ 39.
   

10. Ibid., 39–40; see also Judith Butler, ‘‘Restaging the Universal,’’ 11.
    

    to disguise it, for, Butler argues, the universalist feminism of theorists such as Martha Nussbaum and Susan Moller Okin ‘‘does not under- stand the parochial character of its own norms, and does not consider the way in which feminism works in full complicity with US colonial aims.’’
    11
    But if liberals embrace their particularism, and if critics accept the situated nature of their criticism, what force can their normative claims have over those who disagree?
    

    It is on this question that Butler’s position is weak. On the one hand, she makes forceful claims for the completeness of the critic’s entrapment within her existing context, claims that call into question the very possibility of genuinely critical argument or normative theory that can have any application beyond the subject who produces it.
    12
    On the other hand, Butler wants to avoid the criticism that her approach leaves feminists with no normative resources. As such, she insists that, despite the problems she has outlined, normative principles are re- quired. She even allows that the concept of the ‘‘universal,’’ though deeply problematic, is crucial to normative theory. However, we are left with what Butler describes as the ‘‘paradox’’ of the need to construct a universal category that can only ever be culturally specific
    13
    —a paradox which Butler sometimes suggests can never be answered.
    14
    

    Seyla Benhabib also engages with the question of how to reconcile an account of social construction with normative feminist arguments. She suggests that social construction, or what she calls the ‘‘Death of Man,’’ can take either a strong or a weak form, with only the weak form aiding feminism. In its strong sense, which impedes feminism, it declares the death of the subject conceived of as an autonomous agent. According to the strong sense, there can be no autonomy be- cause there is no position immune from social influence, and no indi- vidual who has not been shaped by social norms. This strong sense is redolent of Foucault’s early work, in which individuals are represented as docile bodies, unable to resist the violent force of their surroundings. It is clear why feminists must reject this thesis: if individuals can never be autonomous, there can never be an emancipatory feminist project.
    15
    Instead, feminists can accept the thesis of the Death of Man only in
    

11. Butler, ‘‘Restaging the Universal,’’ 35.
    

12. Butler, ‘‘Contingent Foundations,’’ 42. 13. Ibid., 129.