Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu
Abstract This paper argues that a positive engagement between Bourdieu's sociology of practice and contemporary feminist theory would be mutually profitable. It compares Bourdieu's account of the social construction of the human subject through practice with Butler's account of subjectivity as performance. While Bourdieu's concept of habitus tends towards an 'overdetermined' view of subjectivity in which subjective dispositions are too tightly tied to the social practices in which they were forged, Butler's theory pays insufficient attention to the social conditions of performative subversion. The second half examines feminist studies of class-gender relationships that have drawn fruitfully on Bourdieu's work, particularly his concept of cultural capital.
Terry Lovell / Read paper