Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu

Terry Lovell’s “Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu” stands as a pivotal intervention in feminist theory at the turn of the millennium, offering a sophisticated negotiation between two of the most influential theoretical frameworks for understanding gender and social reproduction. Published in the inaugural issue of Feminist Theory in 2000, this article has become essential reading for scholars seeking to understand the complex relationship between structure and agency in feminist analysis.

The Promise of Productive Engagement

Lovell begins with a compelling proposition: that feminist theory and Bourdieu’s sociology of practice have much to gain from serious mutual engagement. This suggestion was particularly bold given the feminist criticisms of Bourdieu’s apparent gender-blindness in much of his work. Yet Lovell sees beyond these limitations, identifying in Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus—particularly his concepts of habitus, field, and capital—powerful tools for feminist analysis that had been underutilized or misunderstood.

The article’s central contribution lies in its refusal to simply adopt or reject Bourdieu wholesale. Instead, Lovell performs what might be called a critical appropriation, thinking both “with” and “against” Bourdieu to develop a more nuanced understanding of how gender operates as a fundamental organizing principle of social life. This approach models a form of theoretical engagement that avoids both uncritical adoption and wholesale dismissal, demonstrating how feminist theory can transform the tools it borrows.

Habitus Meets Performativity: A Theoretical Encounter

The heart of Lovell’s analysis lies in her comparative reading of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. Both theorists, she notes, are concerned with how subjects are formed through social practice, yet they offer dramatically different accounts of this process and its possibilities for transformation.

The Weight of Habitus

Bourdieu’s habitus—those durable, transposable dispositions that generate practices and perceptions—offers a powerful explanation for the reproduction of gender inequality. Lovell appreciates how habitus captures the deep embodiment of social structures, the way gender becomes “second nature” through repeated practice. The concept helps explain why gender inequality persists even when explicitly challenged, rooted as it is in pre-reflexive, bodily dispositions formed through early socialization.

However, Lovell identifies a crucial limitation: Bourdieu’s habitus tends toward determinism. The dispositions formed in particular social fields seem too tightly bound to their conditions of production. While Bourdieu acknowledges the possibility of habitus transformation when fields change, his theory struggles to account for how agents might actively resist or reshape the very structures that formed them. The weight of history embedded in the habitus threatens to crush possibilities for feminist transformation.

The Lightness of Performativity

Butler’s theory of gender performativity offers a contrasting vision. Gender, for Butler, is constituted through repeated performative acts that create the illusion of a natural, stable identity. This repetition always contains the possibility of subversion—gender can be “done differently,” potentially undermining the regulatory norms that govern its performance.

Yet Lovell argues that Butler’s account suffers from the opposite problem to Bourdieu’s. While Bourdieu’s subjects seem over-determined by their social conditions, Butler’s performative subject appears curiously weightless, insufficiently anchored in the material and social conditions that enable or constrain performative subversion. Butler’s theory, Lovell suggests, underestimates the difficulty of transforming deeply embodied dispositions and the social structures that support them.

The Question of Agency

The Bourdieu-Butler comparison crystallizes around the problem of agency—how can subjects shaped by oppressive structures become agents of transformation? Lovell shows how each theorist offers a partial solution that exposes the limitations of the other.

Bourdieu’s agents possess a practical sense, a feel for the game that enables strategic action within social fields. Yet this agency seems limited to playing by existing rules rather than changing them. The habitus generates practices that tend to reproduce the structures that produced it, creating a circular logic that feminist politics struggles to break.

Butler locates agency in the gaps and fissures of performative repetition, in drag performances and other subversive citations that expose gender’s constructed nature. But Lovell questions whether such performative subversions, however symbolically powerful, can transform the material structures and embodied dispositions that sustain gender inequality. The problem is not just revealing gender’s performative nature but changing the social conditions that make certain performances possible and others unthinkable.

Class, Gender, and Cultural Capital

The second half of Lovell’s article examines how feminist scholars have productively employed Bourdieu’s concepts, particularly cultural capital, to analyze the intersection of class and gender. She highlights the work of Toril Moi and Beverley Skeggs, who demonstrate how Bourdieu’s framework can illuminate the complex ways class and gender inequalities reinforce each other.

Cultural Capital and Feminine Devaluation

Lovell shows how feminist appropriations of Bourdieu reveal the gendered nature of cultural capital itself. What counts as legitimate culture, the dispositions valued in educational and professional fields, the very definition of distinction—all bear the marks of masculine domination. Middle-class women may possess cultural capital, but this capital is devalued when embodied in female form. Working-class women face double exclusion, lacking both the class-based cultural capital and the gender that would allow its full realization.

This analysis reveals how the education system, which Bourdieu identified as crucial for social reproduction, operates through gendered as well as classed mechanisms. Girls’ educational success does not translate straightforwardly into social power because the fields where cultural capital is converted into economic and social capital remain structured by masculine domination.

Emotional Capital and Invisible Labor

Lovell explores how feminist scholars have extended Bourdieu’s concept of capital to include forms of value creation that his framework overlooked. The concept of “emotional capital”—the emotional labor disproportionately performed by women—reveals how Bourdieu’s emphasis on public fields obscured the work done in private spheres that enables public participation. This feminist extension of Bourdieu’s framework exposes how the apparent gender-neutrality of his categories actually conceals masculine bias.

Methodological Implications

Lovell’s article also addresses methodological questions about how to study gender using Bourdieusian concepts. She argues for the importance of historicizing both habitus and field, showing how gender dispositions and the fields in which they operate change over time. This historical sensitivity offers a way beyond the determinism of a static habitus, revealing moments when changing fields create possibilities for new gender practices.

The article advocates for ethnographic attention to women’s practical consciousness—their often ambivalent relationship to dominant gender norms. Rather than assuming either complete subjection or heroic resistance, Lovell calls for careful attention to how women navigate the contradictions between different fields, how they strategically deploy different aspects of their habitus, and how they sometimes recognize and reject the “illusio” of particular games.

Toward a Feminist Sociology of Practice

Lovell concludes by outlining what a feminist appropriation of Bourdieu might look like. This would involve:

1. Gendering the Concepts: Recognizing that habitus, capital, and field are always already gendered, not neutral categories to which gender is added.

2. Expanding the Fields: Including domestic and emotional fields alongside the public fields Bourdieu emphasized, showing how these different fields interconnect.

3. Historicizing Reproduction: Understanding social reproduction as a historical process subject to crisis and transformation, not an automatic mechanism.

4. Theorizing Resistance: Developing better accounts of how dominated groups can develop critical consciousness and transformative practices despite their subordinate position.

Critical Responses and Ongoing Debates

Lovell’s article has generated extensive discussion about the relationship between feminist theory and sociology of practice. Critics have questioned whether Bourdieu’s framework, even when modified, can adequately address feminist concerns about transformation. Some argue that Lovell underestimates Butler’s attention to material conditions, while others suggest she is too optimistic about Bourdieu’s potential for feminist appropriation.

These debates reflect broader tensions within feminist theory about structure versus agency, material versus discursive analysis, and reform versus revolution. Lovell’s contribution is not to resolve these tensions but to show how engaging with them through the Bourdieu-Butler comparison can generate new insights and strategies.

Contemporary Relevance

More than two decades after its publication, Lovell’s article remains highly relevant to contemporary feminist debates. The questions she raises about embodied dispositions and their transformation speak directly to current discussions about implicit bias and systemic oppression. Her analysis of cultural capital’s gendered nature illuminates ongoing debates about women’s educational achievement and workplace discrimination.

The article also offers resources for understanding new forms of feminist politics. The #MeToo movement, for instance, might be analyzed as a moment when the habitus of gender relations enters crisis, when what was once doxic (taken for granted) becomes orthodoxy (explicitly defended) and eventually heterodoxy (contested). Lovell’s framework helps explain both the power of such movements and the resistance they encounter.

Theoretical Legacy

Lovell’s “Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu” has become a model for how feminist theory can engage productively with non-feminist social theory. Rather than simply rejecting male theorists or uncritically adopting their frameworks, Lovell demonstrates a form of critical appropriation that transforms the tools it borrows.

The article’s influence extends beyond feminist theory to affect how Bourdieu is read more generally. Many scholars now recognize that any serious engagement with Bourdieu must address the feminist critiques and extensions Lovell helped articulate. Her work has contributed to a more gender-sensitive reading of practice theory and a more sociologically grounded feminist theory.

Conclusion: The Ongoing Dialogue

Terry Lovell’s article does not offer a final synthesis of Bourdieu and feminist theory but rather opens a dialogue that continues to generate new insights. By thinking with Bourdieu, feminists gain powerful tools for analyzing the reproduction of gender inequality. By thinking against him, they reveal the limitations of any framework that fails to center gender as a fundamental organizing principle of social life.

The article’s enduring value lies in its demonstration that theoretical engagement across difference—thinking with and against—can be more productive than either wholesale adoption or rejection. In showing how feminist theory can appropriate, transform, and exceed Bourdieu’s sociology of practice, Lovell provides a model for creative theoretical work that remains attentive to both structural constraints and transformative possibilities. This balanced approach, refusing both determinism and voluntarism, continues to offer resources for understanding and challenging gender inequality in all its complex manifestations.