Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (8 page)

1. Pat Califia, ‘‘Feminism and Sadomasochism’’; Nancy Friday,
   My Secret Garden.
   Recent Mills and Boon titles include
   Christmas at His Command, At the Playboy’s Pleasure, The Thaw- ing of Mara, A Rich Man’s Revenge, Surrender to a Playboy, The Bedroom Surrender, Surrender to the Millionaire,
   and
   Back in the Boss’s Bed.
   Similar Cartland titles include
   The Cruel Count, The Taming of a Tigress, Kneel for Mercy, The Marquis Wins, Punished With Love, Dangerous Dandy, Complacent Wife, Odious Duke, Poor Governess, Theresa and a Tiger,
   and
   Royal Punish- ment.
   

2. MacKinnon,
   Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
   , xiii.
   

3. Bourdieu,
   Masculine Domination,
   21.
   

4. Pierre Bourdieu and Lo¨ıc Wacquant,
   An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology
   , 167; emphasis in the original.
   

   because its effect is to create symbolic normative images of ideal gen- dered behavior. Compliance is willing precisely because it never needs to be sought: patriarchy operates significantly through the construction of desires and thoughts, influencing what choices people want to make so that some options are ruled out beforehand. As will be discussed in the next section, Bourdieu conceptualizes this shaping of individuals in terms of ‘‘habitus’’: a durable set of dispositions formed in response to objective social conditions. As a result, patriarchy does not need to rely on the heavy-handed and resistance-prone mechanism of ruling out options after people have decided that they would like to choose them. Instead, compliance is secured more easily by ruling out options before they are considered, so that people never come to choose. In this respect, Bourdieu’s approach echoes that of Foucault. Women’s compliance is a
   prereflexive
   compliance: it does not need to be con- sciously accepted and affirmed because it is always and already the organizing idea of consciousness.
   21
   The combination of apparent natu- ralness and symbolic violence renders systems of male domination ex- tremely solid.
   

   Habitus and Field
   

   Bourdieu uses the concept of habitus to explain how social norms be- come embedded in individuals. An individual’s habitus develops, for Bourdieu, in response to the social sphere in which the individual lives and acts: a space Bourdieu terms the ‘‘field.’’
   22
   A field is a sphere of action that places certain limits on those who act within it, according to their status within the field. That status in turn is determined by the capital, or the collection of resources, the individual has. Different fields prioritize different forms of capital, such as education, money, honor, and beauty.
   

   As Bourdieu points out, the fact that a field imposes certain rules on its members does not in itself explain why those rules are obeyed. Bourdieu offers an explanation for this obedience in terms of habitus. The habitus is the means by which objective social structures are repro- duced
   in the body,
   and thereby influence individuals’ actions. The habi- tus is produced in response to certain external conditions, and itself
   

5. Bourdieu,
   Masculine Domination,
   35.
   

6. Bourdieu and Wacquant,
   Invitation to Reflexive Sociology,
   97.
   

   produces certain kinds of actions. The habitus is a durable disposition to act in a certain way, which comes into existence as a result of the objective conditions of existence within a particular society or field. The habitus is both a ‘‘structured structure’’—the effect of the actions of other people—and a ‘‘structuring structure’’—it suggests and con- strains the individual’s actions.
   23
   The habitus is the result of human interaction. Thus Charles Taylor argues that ‘‘following rules is a
   social
   practice’’
   24
   and describes the habitus as capturing ‘‘this level of social understanding.’’
   25
   

   As people respond to the circumstances within which they live, they become accustomed to those particular responses and, over time, re- peat them with little or no conscious awareness or choice—whether or not the conditions that first made the response appropriate actually pertain. Bourdieu’s preferred example is ‘‘the small, quick steps of some young women wearing trousers and flat heels’’
   26
   which have be- come habitual because they are required when wearing short skirts and high heels. In this way, the habitus prompts us to act in certain ways without needing to go via the mechanism of conscious thought and rational decision-making. Instead, the habitus operates through the mechanism of embodiment. We understand the norms we obey through acting them out. We do not think consciously about them, and consider on each occasion whether to comply with them. Rather, we comply as a result of prereflexive, habitualized action.
   27
   Moreover, as MacKinnon argues, what is at stake is not merely whether we will
   act
   in certain ways. What is at stake is whether we
   become
   certain sorts of people, how particular discourses construct our identities. Thus MacK- innon quotes a woman coerced into pornography: ‘‘You do it, you do it, and you do it; then you become it.’’
   28
   

   For Bourdieu, an individual’s range of possible actions is already suggested by her habitus. If the habitus and field are aligned, what an individual feels inclined to do will match the expectations of the field in which her action takes place. There will be compatibility between action and expectation, and the individual is unlikely to be aware of, or
   

7. Pierre Bourdieu,
   The Logic of Practice,
   53.
   

8. Taylor, ‘‘To Follow a Rule . . . ,’’ 48; emphasis in the original.
   

25. Ibid., 51.

1. Bourdieu,
   Masculine Domination,
   29.
   

2. Pierre Bourdieu,
   Pascalian Meditations
   , 170–71.
   

3. MacKinnon,
   Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
   , 123.
   

   consciously assess, her actions and dispositions. Individuals are thus very significantly influenced by the surroundings and structures in which they live.
   29
   As individuals tend to remain in social contexts in which they feel comfortable, their habituses are reinforced and tend to remain constant. It follows, moreover, that the social structures that influence an individual’s habitus will be strengthened over time as in- dividuals act in ways that are suggested by, and serve to reinforce, those structures. In other words, in the absence of the kind of dissonance between habitus and field that can lead individuals to become con- scious and questioning of their dispositions, systems of disadvantage are unlikely to be disrupted by those who are disadvantaged.
   

   Gender and Field
   

   It is not entirely clear how gender fits into Bourdieu’s analysis of habi- tus and field. It clearly makes sense to think of a gendered habitus, a set of bodily dispositions ordered along gendered lines. The gendered body is a prime example of one ordered by norms, or discipline: women and men hold and use their bodies differently in ways that cannot be explained by biological difference alone. Bourdieu himself provides many such examples of a gendered habitus, such as the effect of clothing.
   30
   

   As a central element of Bourdieu’s work is his argument that habi- tus develops in response to field, it is natural to ask which field is responsible for the development of a gendered habitus. Some feminists have suggested, albeit in other terms, that the
   family
   is the field in which the habitus is gendered; or the field to which women are con- fined and in which the female habitus is developed, with the male habitus developing in response to the field of the workplace.
   31
   Bourdieu explicitly rejects these ideas. The family does operate as a field for Bourdieu, but in the sense that it is the general site of transmission of ‘‘economic, cultural and symbolic privileges,’’
   32
   such as those associ- ated with class. The family is not, he argues, the place where masculine
   

4. Bourdieu and Wacquant,
   Invitation to Reflexive Sociology,
   136.
   

5. Bourdieu’s account of the effects of wearing short skirts and high heels has already been described, but see also Bourdieu,
   Masculine Domination,
   29.
   

6. See, for example, Okin,
   Justice, Gender and the Family,
   and Betty Friedan,
   The Feminine Mystique.
   

7. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘On the Family as a Realized Category,’’ 23; see also
   Pascalian Medita- tions
   , 167, and
   Practical Reason
   , 19, 64–67.
   

   domination is principally perpetuated. Instead it is ‘‘in agencies such as the school or the state . . . where principles of domination that go on to be exercised within even the most private universe are developed and imposed.’’
   33
   

   We are left, then with a problem: if the habitus is formed in the context of a specific field but there is no specific field in which the habitus becomes gendered, what is the source of gender difference? Terry Lovell argues that, in the context of Bourdieu’s work, gender should be understood in terms of
   capital.
   Women should be under- stood simultaneously as ‘‘objects—as repositories of capital for some- one else’’ and as ‘‘capital-accumulating subjects.’’
   34
   But while this inter- pretation does shed light on many aspects of gendered experience, it does not explain how the suggestive concept of habitus plays a part: how gender becomes embodied. Perhaps the best way to integrate habi- tus with gender is to conclude that the gendered habitus develops not in response to any one specific field, but rather in response to the gender norms, the symbolic violence, occurring throughout society. Thus, although the family clearly is a site of the perpetuation of gender norms, it is by no means the only such site. We might think of each field as containing (at least) three sets of rules. First, each field is sus- ceptible to some extent to the economic rules of capitalism (or the prevailing economic order). Some fields are more autonomous in this regard than others, but Bourdieu follows Marx in believing that the economic order invades all fields and is partly responsible for their structure.
   35
   Second, a field contains the rules that pertain to it specifi- cally. Thus the academic field, for example, is influenced by material concerns, but also places value on other forms of capital such as tenure and publications. Third, each field contains and enforces a set of gen- der rules: norms about the appropriate behavior of the sexes within that field. These gender rules may merely be those that are common to many other fields (general appearance norms, for example), or they may be specific to that field (for example, formal or informal rules concerning which tasks in a factory should be performed by which gender). As with economic rules, some fields may be more autono-
   

8. Bourdieu,
   Masculine Domination,
   4.
   

9. Lovell, ‘‘Thinking Feminism,’’ 22.
   

10. Bourdieu is highly critical of other aspects of Marx’s work, such as Marx’s failure to separate theoretical classes from actual classes (
    Practical Reason,
    11), his focus on conscious- ness (
    Pascalian Meditations,
    172), and his account of ideology (
    Pascalian Meditations,
    177).
    

    mous from gender rules than others, but all fields embody some gen- der rules, and some gender rules apply in all fields. The gendered habi- tus thus develops in response to all fields, as gender norms are enforced in comparable if not identical ways across all fields.
    

    Although Bourdieu does not make this argument in the specific form in which I present it here, I propose that it is the best way to combine his analysis of gender with his argument that habitus devel- ops in response to field. Moreover, this analysis sits happily with many feminist accounts, not least because it implies, as Bourdieu points out, that ‘‘a vast field of action is opened up for feminist struggles, which are thus called upon to take a distinctive and decisive place within political struggles against
    all
    forms of domination.’’
    36
    In other words, the possibility of change is introduced.
    

    Change
    

    In Chapter 1, I argued that a Foucauldian perspective on social con- struction raises problems for the liberal notion that individual auton- omy can best be guaranteed by noninterference. However, this point is made so effectively in parts of Foucault’s work that it calls into question the very possibility of autonomous action, and undermines the grounds for normative judgment. Bourdieu explicitly attempts to theo- rize a combination of social influence and individual autonomy, and thus to avoid the implication of determinism that sometimes limits Foucault’s work. However, although Bourdieu intends to make room for human agency, his emphasis tends to be on the social constraints that almost determine individuals, rather than on the opportunities for resistance, autonomy, or freedom (terms which do not sit easily with his approach).
    

    Lois McNay suggests that the very value of Bourdieu’s work is that it demonstrates the
    difficulty
    of change: it ‘‘provides a corrective to certain theories of reflexive transformation which overestimate the extent to which individuals living in posttraditional order are able to reshape identity.’’
    37
    The concept of habitus draws our attention to the ways in which norms are imprinted on our bodies, so that it will take more
    

11. Bourdieu,
    Masculine Domination,
    4; emphasis in the original.
    

12. McNay, ‘‘Gender, Habitus and the Field,’’ 113.
    

    than a simple act of will or a consciousness-raising class for us to resist or alter them. Change, then, is difficult. The key question for feminists is whether or not Bourdieu’s approach in particular, and the idea of social construction in general, gives any chance for change.
    

    In line with McNay’s argument, no reader of
    Masculine Domination
    could get the impression that gender norms can easily be resisted. Indeed, the explicit message is often that such norms cannot be re- sisted at all. In passages that echo Shulamith Firestone’s claim that ‘‘no matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere,’’
    38
    Bourdieu describes how women are ‘‘condemned’’ to participate in the symbolic violence of gender,
    39
    and ‘‘cannot fail’’ to adhere to structures and agents of domi- nation.
    40
    Moreover, the only strategies that women have to overcome male domination are deeply problematic, requiring women to efface themselves and thus confirm ‘‘the dominant representation of women as maleficent beings.’’
    41
    It seems we must conclude, with Bourdieu, that ‘‘
    all
    the conditions for the
    full
    exercise of male domination are thus combined.’’
    42
    

    It is easy to see, then, how the reader could find herself sympathetic to what McNay calls the ‘‘common criticism of Bourdieu’s work’’
    43
    — namely, its implications of determinism—despite Bourdieu’s frequent denials. As Lovell puts it, Bourdieu’s work ‘‘is at times bleakly pessi- mistic.’’
    44
    Resisting symbolic violence seems almost impossible on Bourdieu’s analysis, as its structures of dominance reach so deeply into the understanding. If we can perceive the world only through such structures, where will we find the material from which to construct an alternative consciousness? If women have only the cognitive instru- ments of patriarchy, how can we theorize feminism?
    

    These determinist implications have some truth: gender norms can- not be overcome by a ‘‘simple’’ act of will alone. For example, knowing that we wear makeup because there are significant pressures on us to do so, and regretting that fact as it renders us objectified, is not enough
    

13. Shulamith Firestone, ‘‘The Dialectic of Sex,’’ 90.
    

14. Bourdieu,
    Masculine Domination,
    30, 32.
    

15. Ibid., 35; see also Bourdieu,
    Pascalian Meditations,
    170.
    

16. Bourdieu,
    Masculine Domination,
    32.
    

17. Ibid.
    ,
    33; emphasis added.
    

18. McNay, ‘‘Gender, Habitus and the Field,’’ 100.
    

19. Lovell, ‘‘Thinking Feminism,’’ 27.
    

    to stop us from deriving at least some pleasure from selecting and applying it. However, parts of Bourdieu’s analysis also imply that it will be difficult if not impossible for us even to conceptualize radical change, for he asserts that women living under patriarchy lack the cog- nitive resources to do so.
    45
    Such a conclusion is problematic for it seems to rule out social change and conflicts with the fact that change does occur, sometimes as the result of radical theorizing, for example, of feminists about and against patriarchy.
    

    Consciousness-Raising and Reflexivity
    

    For MacKinnon, consciousness-raising is fundamental to feminism: it is feminism’s method.
    46
    Precisely because gender and gender hierar- chy are socially constructed phenomena, it is necessary for feminists to attempt to deconstruct them, via consciousness-raising. Moreover, the fact that women are themselves partially constituted by the sym- bolic violence of gender makes consciousness-raising not less effective, as Bourdieu argues, but more effective:
    

    Feminist method as practiced in consciousness raising, taken as a theory of knowing about social being, pursues another epistemology. Women are presumed able to have access to so- ciety and its structure because they live in it and have been formed by it, not in spite of those facts. . . . Feminist epistemol- ogy asserts that the social process of being a woman is on some level the same process as that by which woman’s conscious- ness becomes aware of itself as such and of its world. Mind and world, as a matter of social reality, are taken as interpene- trated.
    47
    

    It is not the case, MacKinnon asserts, that the social construction of dominated individuals prevents them from conceptualizing their dom- ination. Whereas Bourdieu’s account of symbolic violence casts doubt on the possibility of female emancipation with its idea that women ‘‘cannot fail’’ to adhere to principles of masculine domination since they have ‘‘only cognitive instruments that [are] no more than the em-
    

20. Bourdieu,
    Masculine Domination,
    35; Bourdieu,
    Pascalian Meditations,
    170.
    

21. MacKinnon,
    Toward a Feminist Theory of the State,
    83.