Feminists re-reading Bourdieu Old debates and new questions about gender habitus and gender change julie mcleod Deakin University,Australia a b s t rac t There is a revival of interest in Bourdieu’s work and this article examines dominant trends within feminist re-engagements. It considers the insights into gender identity afforded by ‘habitus’ and ‘social field’, distinguishing between analyses of ‘gender habitus’, and the potential of habitus and social field for feminist analysis of change. Feminist responses to Bourdieu continue to be divided on the extent to which social field structure determines habitus, and there is a tendency to represent the relationship as too seamless and coherent. Drawing on debates within recent feminist sociology, notably the work of Lois McNay and Lisa Adkins, this article argues instead for greater acknowledgement of the instability of gender norms and the contradictory effects of crossing different social fields. A feminist rethinking of the relationship between gender change, habitus and social field is suggested, which arises from a more contextual analysis of the varying degrees of correspondence between habitus and field. This addresses the co-existence of change and continuity in gender relations and identities, and aims to move such debates beyond questions of either freedom or reproduction.
k e y w o r d s Bourdieu, feminism, gender, habitus, social field, sociology of education
I n t h e l a s t d e ca d e there has been an obvious revival of interest among sociologists of education in the work of Bourdieu (Reay, 1995; Grenfell et al., 1998; Nash, 1999; Ball et al., 2000; Arnot, 2002;Webb et al., 2002; Brantlinger, 2003). There has also been noticeable interest from feminist scholars, both inside and outside of education, in working with Bourdieu’s concepts, particularly those of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’, to understand gender relations and Theory and Research in Education Copyright © 2005, sage publications, www.sagepublications.com vol 3(1) 11–30 ISSN 1477-8785 DOI: 10.1177/147787850504 9832
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Theory and Research in Education 3(1) identities (McCall, 1992; Fowler, 1996; Skeggs, 1997; Reay, 1998; Butler, 1999; Lawler, 1999; McNay, 1999; Lovell, 2000; McLeod, 2000; McNay, 2000; Adkins 2002a).1 A central question, and one that motivates this article, is what this (re)engagement with Bourdieu’s work offers for feminist sociology of education, and for feminist accounts of gender identity and gender relations today. Do Bourdieu’s signature concepts of habitus and field lead us to re-conceive the cultural and social practices of ‘gender’ – topics that have been the focus of intense, intensive and productive feminist enquiry for at least the past 30 years? Do they help us to think differently about gender identities and gender relations, and what is the difference they make? To explore such questions, I first consider the shifting reception of Bourdieu’s work in selected countries,2 and then chart ongoing debates among feminist scholars about the usefulness and the dangers of his key concepts of habitus and fields. I make an analytic distinction between habitus as a resource for theorizing gender identity formation, and habitus and field as offering scope for developing a feminist analysis, and for interpreting transformations in gender. Overall it is argued here that in much feminist and nonfeminist work, the field/habitus relation tends towards reproductionist versions of ‘gender socialization’. Second, drawing from Lois McNay’s (1999, 2000) attempt to recuperate and renovate some of Bourdieu’s key insights for feminist theory, some fruitful directions for Bourdieuian framed analysis within feminist sociology of education are outlined. This requires acknowledging the contradictory effects and dissonance of crossing different fields, and more sustained attention to questions of how gender identities and relations are changing or being re-articulated in new but familiar ways. In such a view, a more uneven and less seamless relation between habitus and field is possible, and this offers scope for feminist analysis of change and continuity. This point is discussed briefly in reference to a qualitative, cross-generational study3 that explores the life histories and educational and work trajectories of economically disadvantaged young Australian women. Finally, in the spirit of Bourdieu’s own reflexive interrogations of his intellectual habitus and the perspective of the sociologist (Bourdieu, 2000), this article proposes a more reflexive and historically situated analysis of the renewed interest in his work. Bourdieu’s analysis of the scholastic point of view is instructive here: this point of view refers to an intellectual bias, a set of dispositions and perspectives that are produced within the academic field (Schirato and Webb, 2003: 545). Bourdieu argues that the scholastic point of view is characterized by its relative indifference to the ‘logic of practice’ and its masquerading as a ‘natural’ point of view, a perspective without a history. The role of the (Bourdieuian) critical sociologist is to subject that presumption to historical scrutiny, to expose the production and illusion of [12]
McLeod: Feminists re-reading Bourdieu impartiality and singularity and examine its sociological and practical effects (Bourdieu, 2000: 21–2). In a parallel move, we need to foster more critical speculation on the effects that the (re)turn to Bourdieu is having upon the field of educational research, and on the agendas of feminist enquiry. In part, such questions are ineluctably framed by a long line of feminist scepticism about why ‘we’,‘feminists’, might need to engage with ‘them’,‘male high theory’ – what can feminism learn or gain from this encounter? In what ways can re-engagement not be a reiteration, a display of subordination? Catherine Hall, for example, argued forcefully in relation to the massive influence of another French intellectual: [W]e feminists did not need post-structuralism to develop gender as a category of analysis . . . Similarly, it could be suggested that feminists did not need Foucault to understand that historical writing was a male centred form of writing. (Hall, 1991: 209)
So the questioning here has traces of that feminist tradition, but is also animated by a genealogical interest in understanding why, in this particular historical period, concepts derived from Bourdieu are judged to be productive and useful. In terms of the history of ideas, or ‘systems of reasoning’ (Popkewitz et al., 2001) within educational research, why and with what effects are particular theorists taken up or re-visited?4 The background questions in the following discussion are thus ‘Why Bourdieu now?’ and ‘Why Bourdieu for feminist enquiry?’ (cf Schrag, 1999; McLeod, 2001). Before examining this, I begin by elaborating the meaning of habitus and field, as represented by Bourdieu and by commentators broadly sympathetic to his intellectual project.
hab i tu s and s oc i al f i e l d rev i s i te d Understood as ‘socialized subjectivity’, habitus describes dispositions and embodied ‘ways of being’, including orientations, values and ways of comporting oneself, and is formed in interaction with ‘social fields’. Habitus expresses ‘how individuals “become themselves”’, and ‘the ways in which those individuals engage in practices’ (Webb et al., 2002: xii). It constitutes a ‘system of lasting and transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 18). Habitus is a ‘strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 72). It is not a uniformly imposed and fixed way of being, but a ‘generative structure’ formed in a dynamic relation with specific social fields (McNay, 1999). Bourdieu describes interactions with the field as a matter of learning the ‘rules of the game’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Fields are [13]
Theory and Research in Education 3(1) structured contexts which shape and produce these processes and practices; they are ‘a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations, appointments and titles which constitute an objective hierarchy, and which produce and authorise certain discourses and activities’ and that which counts as valuable ‘capital’ is determined (Webb et al., 2002: 21–22). The field structures and predisposes but, at least on Bourdieu’s own account, there is space for improvisation: habitus is ‘creative, inventive, but within the limits of its structures’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 19). Bourdieu emphasizes that the past is in the present, and that habitus is ‘made’ not simply inherited; despite the illusion of it as a natural way of being in the world, habitus ‘is history turned into nature’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 78). Bourdieu describes the relationship between habitus and field as one of ‘ontological complicity’, a conceptualization that he argues contrasts with the persistent dualism of objectivism/subjectivism, structure/agency. ‘Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism’ (quoted in Webb et al., 2002: 32). The notion of ‘ontological complicity’ attempts to undermine such dualistic thinking (the field as an ‘external object’ acting upon ‘the subject’) by suggesting instead a process akin to insinuation – less a cause–effect relation, and more an imbrication of one in the other. Bourdieu emphasizes the productive and dynamic relation between social and institutional practices (social fields) and processes of self-formation, arguing in a 1989 interview with Wacquant: Social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside agents. And when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it finds itself ‘as a fish in water’, it does not feel the weight of the water and takes the world about itself for granted. (Quoted in Grenfell and James, 1998: 14)
‘Ontological complicity’ also invokes the significance of embodiment. Habitus is not simply a mental schemata, but a way of bodily being in the world, the way one occupies and moves in space and across and within fields (McLeod, 2000). Habitus is formed through the embodied accumulation and effects of dispositions (not unlike, conceptually, the accumulation of capitals). Bourdieu writes that habitus is expressed through durable ways ‘of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking’ (Reay, 1995: 354). While habitus is most often mobilized as a concept, Diane Reay suggests that habitus is best understood not only as a theory but also as a method. According to Bourdieu: The main thing is that they [core ideas] are not to be conceptualised so much as ideas, on that level, but as a method. The core of my work lies in the method and a way of thinking. To be more precise, my method is a manner of asking questions rather than just ideas. This, I think is a critical point. (Quoted in Reay, 1995: 358)
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McLeod: Feminists re-reading Bourdieu Bourdieu’s ongoing concern with the methodological dimensions of his work is evident in The Weight of the World (1999), a powerful interview-based account of how ‘ordinary people’ are negotiating lives in a time of major social, cultural and economic upheaval.5 The many interviews and the structure of the book present the perspectives of different groups of people who are affected by a common experience – for example, life on a housing estate. Bourdieu describes this as a necessary ‘perspectivism’. ‘We must work,’ he argues, ‘with the multiple perspectives that correspond to the multiplicity of coexisting, and sometimes directly competing, points of view (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 3–4). At the same time, Bourdieu remains committed to uncovering ‘the immanent structures contained in the contingent statements of a discrete interaction’ (1999: 618). His approach in that project was to listen attentively to the detail of people’s lives in order to read the effects of ‘objective relations’ in the apparently idiosyncratic. He aimed to understand the organizing, underlying and relatively systematic relations and structures that govern particular lives; to understand, in other words, the complexity of interactions between social space/field and habitus. This brief description of methodological concerns6 underpinning The Weight of the World points to a persistent dilemma in how the relationship between habitus and field is conceptualized: to what degree and how tightly do the ‘objective relations’ of social fields structure habitus? While Bourdieu insists that it is a relationship of ‘complicity’, critical responses to his work, nevertheless, continue to be dominated by debates about the extent to which his concepts simply represent another version of structural determinism, with the relationship between habitus and social field signalling the guarantee of social reproduction (Shusterman, 1999; Lovell, 2000; Arnot, 2002). In order to assess these different perspectives and their implications for feminist ‘uses’ of Bourdieu, I now turn to review the shifting reception of Bourdieu’s work, and recent debates about the relation between habitus and field.
b o u r d i e u : t h e n a n d n ow When I first started reading in the sociology of education in the 1980s (Bourdieu, 1976a, 1976b), Bourdieu’s work was strongly associated in education with analyses of social and cultural reproduction. Indeed, there seemed to be an abundance of papers making arguments to the effect that education was the site for the reproduction of social values and cultural capital, followed by a code-like reference to Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, and Bowles and Gintis, 1976. Madeleine Arnot’s work (1979 in Arnot, 2002) was distinctive and important during this time, for she placed the reproduction of gender and the concept of ‘gender codes’ into this mode of analysis, insisting on their [15]
Theory and Research in Education 3(1) relevance for educational sociology. While seeing value in ‘habitus’ for understanding the socialization and reproduction of gender, Arnot nevertheless identified dangers in working with this concept. She argued that Bourdieu ‘offers no account of social change in the cultural arena’ (Arnot, 2002: 49), a point that has often been, and continues to be, made about his work (Butler, 1999). Writing in 1979, Arnot (then MacDonald) argued: The cultural reproduction of class and sexual identities appears to be a ‘deep’ unconscious process which, although materially determined, is unlikely to be broken. He seems to discount the possibility of change through recognising one’s own habits of thought, perception and action, which potentially could lead to a radical programme of action for ‘breaking’ the sexual and economic divisions of labour instead of just restructuring them. Such an ‘awakening’ could only be the product of changed material circumstances, the causes of which remain unspecified. (Arnot, 2002: 49)
She notes two particular dangers with the concept of ‘habitus’. First, it is ‘hard to establish the nature of its existence and the forms it may take in different historical junctures’, and further, Bourdieu simply ‘deduces the impact in individuals’ consciousness of economic, symbolic and sexual structures’. Second, ‘haunting his theory is the implication that any planned programme for change . . . can have little impact against social determinism, whether it be class or sexual domination’ (Arnot, 2002: 49). Such perceived problems with habitus and its relations to the social field continue to haunt more recent feminist engagements with Bourdieu’s work (McCall, 1992; Butler, 1999; Lovell, 2000), even if the dilemma is articulated in a differently inflected language and with a different sense of the scope of the political. At one end, there is a complete rejection of the Bourdieuian project because of its perceived rigid determinism. Judith Butler characterises the field/habitus relation as one wherein habitus encounters the field, and submits, dominated by the compelling objectivity and authority of the field (Butler, 1999).7 The relationship between the two domains is not, Butler suggests, one of complicity but is instead a one-way correspondence, such that the effects of the field imprint the habitus. The field is a ‘pre-condition for habitus’ but there is no reciprocal effect upon the field: it is a ‘given’. Butler’s dismissive account is perhaps not surprising given her celebratory theoretical focus on the transgressive performance/performativity of the subject (Lovell, 2000).8 Nevertheless, she is not alone in either her critical discussion of Bourdieu’s over-riding ‘canonical structuralism’ (Margolis, 1999: 75) or her doubtfulness of the benefits of his work for accounting for disruptions to the gender order or for developing feminist theories of transformation (Lovell, 2000). In light of such criticisms, it is instructive to re-read some of the early formulations of habitus (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977), and to encounter the unambiguous structuralist language and forms of reasoning. There are clear [16]
McLeod: Feminists re-reading Bourdieu imperatives to establish general principles and rule-bound investigations, a social scientistic, ‘objective’ tenor of writing, an image of a tightly bound relationship and synchronicity between habitus and social field.9 On the one hand, then, it is not difficult to understand why so much critique of Bourdieu continues to characterize his work as irredeemably structuralist and determinist. And, as noted above, in more recent studies, such as The Weight of the World (1999), Bourdieu’s project remains clearly oriented to understanding the social and structural organization of the apparently idiosyncratic and individual. On the other hand, debates over degrees of ‘determination’ or of ‘invention’ are persistent in much sociology of education, and many of the charges levelled at Bourdieu are often generic, mobilized against any studies of ‘reproduction’. There seems to be little analytic gain in simply and repeatedly castigating Bourdieu for being a ‘reproductionist’. Some contemporary commentators have attempted to reformulate the relationship between habitus and field so that it is imagined as less tightly deterministic and rigidly presumed, emphasizing more the scope for improvization and degrees of inventiveness alongside the structural and shaping qualities of habitus (e.g. Ball et al., 2000). This is also an emerging strand of work within feminist research (McNay, 1999). Bourdieu himself has argued that social fields have their own conventions and ‘rules of the game’, the effects of which are uneven, producing degrees of continuity and change in habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 96–115). More recently in Pascalian Meditations (2000), Bourdieu suggests that in some circumstances habitus might have a more attenuated relationship to field: The diversity of conditions, the corresponding diversity of habitus and the multiplicity of intra- and intergenerational movements of ascent or decline mean that habitus may, in many cases, be confronted with processes of actualization different from those in which they were produced. (Bourdieu, 2000: 160–1)
These different emphases and ways of articulating the pivotal field/habitus relation raise two types of issue. One concerns potential shifts in how Bourdieu either represents or appears to represent his project. The other issue, which is of more relevance to this article, is the shifting reception and ways of reading his oeuvre, particularly given the current upsurge of interest in his conceptual approaches: how is his work being ‘read’ and ‘utilized’ now? Contemporary feminist readings of Bourdieu show a range of responses and I now turn to review some influential trends and tendencies in feminist work that seek to adapt the concepts of habitus and field for theorizing gender. I distinguish between approaches that predominantly focus on the ‘reproductive’ aspects of habitus and those that open up possibilities for theorizing change and contradiction. [17]
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f e m i n i st re - read i ng s of bourd i e u One question for feminist ‘uses’ of Bourdieu is whether ‘habitus’ can be transposed from one conceptual lexicon to examine the practices of gender identity or other dimensions of identity such as sexuality, race or ethnicity (e.g. Hage, 1998; Dolby, 2000). Is a mode of analysis that was initially developed to account for forms of capital, patterns of class differentiation, and hierarchies of distinction, appropriate for the task of theorizing other social relations and patterns and intersections of difference? An associated question for feminist analysis concerns the matter of what habitus does not encompass. Is habitus particularly helpful for understanding the power of desires, emotions, and longing in the formation of subjectivities? This is not to imply that such matters are the sole preserve of a feminist analysis, and nor should these questions be mistaken as simply aligning femininity with the affective – the re-assertion of traditional binaries. The point is rather to consider issues that have conventionally been central to feminist analysis, and particularly to feminist theorizing of subjectivity. Posing questions about what is included/excluded, made central or made marginal, ignored or privileged, is a fundamental rhetorical and political strategy in feminist analysis. When mobilized as a concept to explain the formation of gender subjectivity, what does habitus occlude, or not allow us to see? In Masculine Domination (Bourdieu, 2001),10 Bourdieu argues that his method and concepts do indeed provide a way of analysing gender and sexual difference. He proposes an investigation of ‘the historical mechanisms responsible for the relative dehistoricization and externalization of the structure of the sexual division and the corresponding principles of division’ (2001: vii–viii, emphasis in original). In his ethnographic study of Kabyle society (which forms the basis of Masculine Domination) Bourdieu seeks to denaturalize gender division,‘to make a naturalized social construction (“genders” as sexually characterised habitus) appear as the grounding in nature of the arbitrary division which underlies both reality and the representation of reality . . .’ (2001: 3). Bourdieu’s aim is to understand the grounding of sexual division, locating ‘gender’ as a particular kind of habitus that has force because it appears part of the natural order of things. In Masculine Domination, the concept of habitus orients the enquiry as an investigation of practices, and it describes the gendered dispositions that appear natural as a consequence of practices of sexual division: The social order functions as an immense symbolic machine tending to ratify the masculine domination on which it is founded: it is the sexual division of labour, a very strict distribution of the activities assigned to each sex, of their place, time and instruments; it is the structure of space, with the opposition between the place of assembly or the market, reserved for men, and house, reserved for women. (Bourdieu, 2001: 9)
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McLeod: Feminists re-reading Bourdieu Such an analysis of the sexual division of labour, however, is hardly news for feminists. It has been one of the founding insights of feminist theory, and of feminist anthropology from at least 1974 when Sherry B. Ortner famously asked ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’ (Ortner, 1974). But in Masculine Domination, Bourdieu writes defensively, and appears somewhat oblivious to the diverse range of important feminist work that has historicized sexual division. Moreover his insights into gender reproduce standard binaries of masculine domination and female subordination as if these structures are unitary, coherent and unchanged by and in contemporary social life (see too McNay, 2000: 53). Bourdieu’s own contribution to debates about the utility of his work for gender analysis does not appear to have much new to offer feminist scholarship. In recent feminist engagements with Bourdieu, the relationship between gender and habitus tends to take two main forms. First, social fields are understood as differentiated by gender (and by class and race) and the habitus is formed in the midst of and structured by these differential relations of power and identity positions, and by the unequal distribution of capitals – economic, cultural, social and symbolic (Skeggs, 1997). Second, subjective dispositions can be gendered. Gender is an ‘inherited’ and embodied way of being that is shaped in interaction with social fields, constituting a repertoire of orientations and dispositions. Diane Reay describes habitus as ‘a complex internalised core from which everyday experiences emanate’, adding that ‘dispositions are inevitably reflective of the social context in which they were acquired’ (Reay, 1995: 537). Gender norms are secured through the internalization and embodiment of particular structures and dispositions. Further, ‘Habitus is primarily a method for analysing the dominance of dominant groups in society and the domination of subordinate groups’ (Reay, 1995). It can be used to focus on the ways in which the socially advantaged and disadvantaged play out attitudes of cultural superiority and inferiority ingrained in their habitus in daily interactions . . . such dispositions are influenced by gender and ‘race’ as well as social class. (Reay, 1995: 360)
Reay’s work (1997, 1998) has been influential in returning critical and feminist attention to structured processes and practices of domination and to provoke closer attention to the place of class in feminist and sociological research in education. It is also part of a body of feminist work drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts to develop understandings of the inseparability of class and gender, and for more historically and culturally locating gender identities, across time and place (e.g. Lawler, 1999; Walkerdine et al. 2001). Nevertheless, despite the importance of such work on ‘gender habitus’ for showing the inseparability of gender and class and the effects of patterns of [19]
Theory and Research in Education 3(1) inequality, there is an associated risk of conceptualizing gender identity as akin to normative processes of socialization, a tendency which, as noted above, is evident in Bourdieu’s own formulations. Additionally, habitus tends to be elided with identity – this is arguably a problem with the concept in general (see too Grenfell and James, 1998). Distinctions between habitus, identity, agency and a theory of subjectivity are not always clear, and the terms are themselves used by some researchers as if they were synonymous or equivalent. ‘The habitus is the universalising mediation which causes an individual agent’s practices, without either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be none the less “sensible” and “reasonable”’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 79). Habitus here is an explanation of aspects of the social agent, but is it the sum? Indeed ‘habitus’ (and not, for example, the unconscious) seems to become a kind of hidden hand, the engine of practice.11 There is, then, a tendency for the notion and practice of ‘gender habitus’ to circulate as an always completed and apparently seamless project, the inexorable playing out and reproduction of structured fields of difference. Gender norms can appear rather unproblematic, produced of course, but nonetheless relatively stable and reflective of the social field, even if it is ‘disturbed’ by race, class and sexuality. In extending habitus and field to account for gender identities and gender formation, many of the characteristics associated with reproductionist class analysis are also carried forward. On the one hand, this provides a powerful analysis of the persistence of difference and inequality, of the significance of embodiment and the translation of social and gender (dis)advantages into ‘natural’ qualities. On the other hand, the complex complicity between habitus and field can be rendered as an alignment such that the reproduction of prevailing gender norms and relations of domination seems secure and straightforward. In summary, one critical question is thus the usefulness of habitus for theorizing gender subjectivity; and a related question is whether the field/habitus framework is relevant for feminist conceptualizations of gender and social change. Habitus and field are obviously helpful for understanding patterns and continuity (or in other words, socialization reproduction) but may be less appropriate for explaining processes of change and how patterns of difference and inequality might take different forms in different historical eras. One of the problems with habitus, as Madeleine Arnot has suggested, is that it is ‘hard to establish the nature of its [habitus] existence and the forms it may take in different historical junctures’ (2002: 49). The issue is thus not simply whether habitus can explain individual ‘acts of resistance’, but whether the Bourdieuian conceptual framework is adequate for theorizing large-scale social/historical shifts or epochal change, or for capturing how habitus or the themes of self might be distinctive in a particular period. In many adaptations of Bourdieu’s [20]
McLeod: Feminists re-reading Bourdieu work, attention tends to remain focussed on the durability and form of the habitus/field relation and less on how that relation might be different in different eras. How else then might feminist research ‘work’ with Bourdieu? Why, indeed, after the many critiques of determinism and ‘lack of social change’, do feminists return to his work to frame their own analyses of gender? Recent feminist work in this field suggests new directions for analysing the relationship between field, habitus and gender in contemporary times.
t h e i n s ta b i l i t y o f g e n d e r n o r m s Lois McNay’s (1999, 2000) feminist analysis of the relation between gender and social field unsettles the key terms that have underpinned much discussion to date on gender habitus. McNay analyses Bourdieu’s work in relation to other social theories (e.g. the work of Giddens and Butler) on subjectivity, gender and agency. It is not possible here to elaborate fully what she regards as the benefits of a Bourdieuian analysis. In short, however, she argues that in much contemporary social theory there is insufficient differentiation in accounts of gender norms. Bourdieu’s insistence on embodiment (through habitus) and structurally differentiated social fields, she suggests, offer potentially stronger ways of conceptualizing gender, identity and change, but this potential is not fully realised in his own work. Indeed she argues that Bourdieu is inattentive to both the ‘internally complex nature of subjectivity’ (2000: 72) and the impact of particular social/historical changes on how women inhabit, experience, move across, change and are changed by new and emerging social fields, as well as by relations within existing fields. He attributes a durability to gender norms, while McNay argues for greater recognition of the instability of gender norms. According to McNay, Bourdieu fails ‘to bring the conceptual implications of the idea of the field, most notably that of societal differentiation, to bear on the idea of habitus.’ Consequently, there is an ‘over-emphasis on the alignment that the habitus establishes between subjective dispositions and the objective structure of the field with regard to gender identities’ (McNay, 1999: 107). This tendency, as I have shown, echoes in many feminist engagements with field and habitus. As McNay argues, ‘While habitus draws attention to the entrenched nature of gender identity, it is important to consider the extent to which its effects may be attenuated by the movement of individuals across fields’ (1999: 106–107). Instead of the metaphor of ‘reflection’ to describe the relation of field to habitus, McNay uses ‘refraction’ to emphasize the noncorresponding forms habitus can take. This is a crucial insight for developing a feminist analysis of habitus and the differentiated and dispersed effects of the [21]
Theory and Research in Education 3(1) social field; and for understanding the ambiguities and unevenness of gender norms today as women are embedded in and move across diverse social fields. Women experience degrees of both autonomy and subordination as they move across social fields such as the labour market, domestic life and the intimate. McNay disputes, for example, the standard gendered binaries of public and private, and breaks down the ‘private’ (‘women’s domain’) into more distinct spheres; for example to avoid conflating the private with the domestic, to separate the intimate from the domestic (1999: 112). Recognizing the varying and even contradictory effects of the dispositions produced in such social fields will produce, she argues, a more nuanced account of gender than the ‘invariant logic’ of sexual division suggested by Bourdieu: [A]s a relational concept the field yields an understanding of society as a differentiated and open structure the negotiation of which yields an active and determinate idea of agency beyond that of generalized notions of reflexivity and performativity. This in turn provides a framework in which to conceptualize the uneven and non-systematic ways in which subordination and autonomy are realized in women’s lives. By construing intimate and domestic relations as overlapping but distinct fields of behaviour, their interconnection and relations with other fields of sociality can be thought not as implacable opposition but in terms of multiple disjunction, overlap and conflict. (McNay, 2000: 71–72)
The possibility of dissonance and disjunction is both evidence of and produces change. There is, moreover, differentiation within and across the identity category of gender, and within the experience of gender, as more than a decade of post-structural and post-colonial feminist theory has argued (Weedon, 1999; Reay, 2001). Moreover, as Skeggs argues, even accepting the Bourdieuian account of capitals and habitus, ‘Femininity is uninhabitable as a complete and coherent identity’ (1997: 102). Such issues are not easily acknowledged in Bourdieu’s account of gender because, as McNay argues, he develops a theory of unitary rather than multiple subjectivity: [Bourdieu] significantly underestimates the ambiguities and dissonances that exist in the way that men and women occupy masculine and feminine subject positions . . . masculine and feminine identities are not unified configurations but a series of uneasily sutured, potentially conflictual subject positions. (McNay, 1999: 107–108)
McNay makes a strong case for acknowledging the effects of greater differentiation of social fields, and the instability of gender norms and ‘potentially conflictual’ subject positions. In indicating, therefore, a less tightly bound relation between habitus and field, the trajectory of this argument also potentially undermines the coherence and distinctive analytic purchase of the couplet.12 When does ‘reconfiguring’ become recasting or rewriting? In what sense does social field not become another term for social context? Are all domains of social life social fields? What marks the specificity of the field? A particular point of habitus and field was to illustrate homologies and structured [22]
McLeod: Feminists re-reading Bourdieu effects, and to work against dualism, yet there are ways in which refiguring the relationship between the two – by loosening the degree of embeddedness – reinstates another form of dualism. McNay’s counter to the determinism of the habitus and field couplet, and the durability of gender norms more easily allows for theorizing change and disruption than it does for continuity and repetition. Her analysis clearly underlines the complexity of subjectivity and of femininity today, but in arguing against tendencies in Bourdieu’s work to reproduction and durability it runs the risk of overstating the instability of gender norms. In this respect, McNay’s ‘corrective’ account is somewhat utopian on two levels. It is an optimistic rendering of the extent of gender transformation made possible by feminism and an equally optimistic assessment of the malleability of Bourdieu’s concepts. An alternative, more sceptical perspective is offered by Lisa Adkins (2002b).13 While conceding that heightened forms of reflexivity, contradictions and even instability may arise from the crossing of different fields, Adkins argues that such dispositions neither necessarily signal nor translate to a dramatic transformation of gender. Instead she argues that such reflexivity, understood as part of shared background practices, can co-exist with the reinscription of ‘traditional’ gender in new but old ways. Adkins argues that reflexivity, rather than an insight into the self arising from the experience of ‘field dissonance’, such as McNay describes, is in fact a more habitual way of being in the contemporary world and of regarding and monitoring oneself. Adkins’ overall argument (Adkins, 2000, 2002a, 2002b) is that ‘reflexivity theorists’ have exaggerated the potential for and effects of gender ‘detraditionalization’. There is a failure to ‘register that reflexivity does not concern a liberal freedom from gender, but may be tied into new arrangements of gender’, (Adkins, 2002a: 12), what she describes as the retraditionalization of gender (Adkins, 2000). She concludes, and in relation to analyses such as McNay’s, the idea of the transposition of the feminine habitus ‘into’ the economy, which leads to a lack of fit between habitus and field, the take up of a reflexive stance towards gender, and to a process of detraditionalization may be a less than adequate conceptualization of the reconfiguring of gender and gender identities in late modernity. In particular, it suggests that this thesis blocks out of view the ways in which reflexivity concerns not so much a straightforward detraditionalization of the norms and expectations of gender but may be tied to a reworking of gender in late modernity . . . (Adkins, 2002a: 12)
Both Adkins’ cautious account and McNay’s more transformative position foreground the implications – the limitations and the potential – of Bourdieu’s work for feminist theorizing of changing social relations and gender identities. While McNay more overtly seeks to account for instability and change in gender, Adkins addresses change and continuity through the re-inscriptions of gender in new social and political times, and by inference, across different [23]
Theory and Research in Education 3(1) cultural and historical spaces. What, then, are the implications of these arguments for researching ‘gender’ within feminist educational studies?
q u e s t i o n s o f g e n d e r s ta b i l i t y / i n s ta b i l i t y – p rac t i ca l i m p l i cat i o n s Bringing the accounts offered by McNay and Adkins into critical tension opens the way for conceptualizing how gender instability and stability and processes of re- and de-traditionalization intersect and happen contemporaneously. This issue is less one of choosing either side of the binary, than of rethinking the usual terms (freedom or resistance) of feminist political and analytical debate. In other words, the critical dilemma becomes not simply one of freedom from the social field, or determination by it, or cultural reproduction versus cultural resistance: these are, I suggest, not the most helpful debates and questions for now. The more pressing political and analytical challenge is attempting to theorize both change and continuity, invention and repetition, and understanding the forms they take today. From the perspective of feminist education studies of gender, for example, the challenge is to research both change and continuity (or instability and stability) in gender relations, as complex processes that happen simultaneously, in both ambivalent and uneven ways, as McNay suggests, but also as Adkins’ analysis suggests, in ways that reiterate traditional gendered relations of power, and new yet familiar figurations of gender. Additionally, grappling with the extent to which, in different contexts and locations, field and habitus are differentially embedded may enrich understandings of how change and continuity happen subjectively (and contextually), and may also be more fruitful than deciding a priori on the absolute rules of that relationship. Further, such an orientation remains open to thinking through the realization and implications of such conceptual frameworks in relation to day-to-day practices and empirical projects. As Bourdieu argues,‘One cannot grasp the most profound logic of the social world unless one becomes immersed in the specificity of an empirical reality’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 271). Let us very briefly take one example of such an ‘empirical project’, and one which provided an initial, immediate prompt for examining current feminist engagements with Bourdieu. This is a cross generational study of young women ‘living on the margins’ of education and work, some identified as ‘at risk’ of early school leaving, others already having left school early. With colleagues,14 I have been researching the social, educational and labour market experiences of these women, attempting to develop a feminist analysis of how gender identities are formed under difficult material and emotional circumstances, and in the context of negotiating the ‘rules of the game’ of [24]
McLeod: Feminists re-reading Bourdieu overlapping yet distinct social fields, such as schooling, interpersonal and friendship cultures and family. The habitus/social field relation offers a productive framework for interpreting the differential impact of institutional and social processes on young women’s decisions about and orientations to school and work, and their sense of themselves in the past and the future. One focus has been generational change and the differences in the mothers’ and daughters’ biographical experiences and aspirations. A second and related focus is emergent, new or uneven patterns of gender alongside traditional and retraditionalized arrangements of gender, seeing how these are then lived out by a specific group of young women who face the risk of economic and social marginalization. How do their encounters with multiple social fields dislocate or unsettle, sediment or reconfigure, gender habitus in new but old ways? How do their habits or practices of reflexivity position them, and/or how might experiences of dissonance and contradiction prompt reflexive insight into the self? Space allows only an indication of the broad parameters of the project in this article, but for further analysis and discussion of findings see Kenway and McLeod (2004), Allard and McLeod (2003), Bullen and Kenway (2004) and Allard, and Bullen and Kenway in this issue.
s p e c u l at i o n s – o r w h y b o u r d i e u n ow ? In this article, I have outlined the predominant debates that continue to frame the reception of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field, analysing in particular feminist debates especially with regard to education about the usefulness of this framework for theorizing gender identities and social change. Recent feminist engagements with Bourdieu do offer productive new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between gender, habitus and social field. In dialogue with this work, I have argued for an approach that addresses the coexistence of change and continuity in gender relations and identities, and allows for a more contextual analysis of the varying degrees of correspondence between habitus and field. I see the renewed interest in the habitus/field relation as not simply reinscribing old debates between ‘reproduction’ or ‘freedom’, but as opening up for scrutiny the contradictory and ambivalent processes that govern that relation. We are at an interesting historical moment in the re-reading and reception of Bourdieu’s work, and there are likely to be many explanations for this resurgence of interest, particularly among feminist and education scholars. It could be interpreted as a reaction against postmodern and poststructural accounts of difference and indeterminacy, and a return to ‘master narratives’ and to the analyses of organizing structures of inequality and distinction. But in many respects this is an unsatisfactory explanation because it reproduces a caricatured [25]
Theory and Research in Education 3(1) picture of both postmodern enquiry and the kinds of dilemmas that are raised by the current engagement with Bourdieu, and it rests on a ‘see-saw’ version of intellectual history. There are arguably some points of substantive congruence between Bourdieu’s structuralist theories and the ‘poststructuralist’ work of, for example Foucault, in their attention to practices of the self and the shaping of particular kinds of dispositions. In contrast to the poststructuralist and Foucauldian stress on contingency and historicity, Bourdieu’s work is oriented to grasping ‘objective relations’ and ‘immanent structures’, a more teleological quest to uncover the organizing principles governing conduct (Bourdieu, 1999). Bourdieu’s concepts offer a way of understanding how the social is insinuated in the subjective, not in random idiosyncratic ways, but in ways that are socially structured, and carry a history with them. Power can be understood as ‘capillary’, to use Foucault’s metaphor, but for Bourdieu the capillaries follow a pattern that can be apprehended and reflect ‘objective relations’, even if at some distance and in attenuated ways. There is, of course, any number of similar types of comparisons and distinctions to be made, but the poststructural/structural distinction is especially topical now. My point in this article, however, has not been to settle for one reading of Bourdieu or to set that against another favoured theorist and find gaps or overlaps. Rather, I have wanted to problematize the renewed interest in Bourdieu, to see it not as signalling a return to ‘truth’, but as a significant and contested issue in the history of ideas in educational and gender research. This is also part of what I understand to be the task of a reflexive sociology, one that attempts to understand and reflect upon the systems of reason (the ‘intellectual habitus’ [Bourdieu, 2000]) that govern our enquiries, the questions we ask, and the readings we make. note s 1. For example, a conference convened by Beverley Skeggs and Lisa Adkins at Manchester University in October 2002 addressed the theme ‘Feminists Evaluate Bourdieu: International Perspectives’ (http://les.mac.ac.uk/ sociology/Seminar/afterbourdieu.shtm). See too a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies (2003) 17(3/4) devoted to the work of Bourdieu and its impact upon cultural studies research, and a recent special issue of the British Journal of the Sociology of Education on the work of Bourdieu in relation to the field of education, (2004) 25(4). 2. In describing an upsurge of interest in Bourdieu’s work, I am referring to the reception of and engagement with his work in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Obviously, the history and reception of Bourdieu’s work elsewhere, for example, in Europe and especially in France and also in North Africa would have a different inflection. 3. Young women negotiating from the margins of education and work: Towards gender justice in education and youth policies and programs. This project is funded by the
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McLeod: Feminists re-reading Bourdieu Australian Research Council, Discovery Grant 2002–04. The Chief Investigators are Julie McLeod, Jane Kenway, Alison Mackinnon and Andrea Allard, with research and administrative support from Katie Wright, Elizabeth Bullen and Danni Sexton-Nicholas. 4. In the preface to their edited collection of essays on cultural history and education, Popkewitz et al. argue that one of the characteristics which distinguishes new forms of cultural history from traditional intellectual history is a concern with knowledge as a field of cultural practices and cultural reproduction . . . The purpose of the investigation into systems of knowledge (or the rules of reason) is to understand how the “common senses” of social and cultural life are invented. (2001: p.ix) 5. Related concerns are discussed in Richard Sennett’s recent book, Respect in a World of Inequality. Here Sennett argues that there has been declining attention to the need for respect for the lives and work of ordinary people. 6. The final chapter in The Weight of the World is an illuminating and succinct account by Bourdieu of his methodological approach in the study, and illustrates the relationship between his empirical and theoretical enquiries. See too Bridget Fowler’s (1996) exegesis of this essay in Theory, Culture and Society. 7. Butler argues that Bourdieu’s staging of the relation between habitus and field as an encounter, presumes that the habitus must be adjusted to the field and that an external relation between them will be traversed through the action by which a habitus submits to the rules of the field, thus becoming refashioned in order to become ‘congruent’ or ‘compatible’. Hence the ideal of adaptation governs the relation between habitus and field, such that the field, often figured as preexisting or as social given, does not alter by virtue of the habitus, but the habitus always and only alters by virtue of the demands put upon it by the ‘objectivity’ of the field. (Butler, 1999: 117) 8. See Butler’s Excitable Speech, and Bourdieu’s riposte in Masculine Domination. 9. Returning to early formulations of habitus after immersion in recent and feminist engagements with Bourdieu is an experience not unlike that of reading The Archaeology of Knowledge after focussing on the ‘later Foucault’structuralist overload. 10. Masculine Domination, English translation and preface 2001; French edition 1998, based on ethnographic work Bourdieu conducted in the early 1960s. 11. A follow on question from this discussion, however, is whether the measure of all forms of social theory should be the extent to which it proposes a fully developed and ‘robust’ theory of subjectivity; or is preoccupation with subjectivity symptomatic of the contemporary turn to the self and processes of individualization and reflexivity. 12. This issue was also by raised by a question from Diane Reay in discussion of an earlier version of this article presented at the Gender and Education Conference, University of Sheffield, UK, 14–16 April, 2003.
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Theory and Research in Education 3(1) 13. Much of Adkins’ (2002b) discussion is directed to the work of ‘reflexivity theorists’ such as Giddens and Beck, and her references to McNay’s work are interwoven in this larger debate. In other respects Adkins endorses much of McNay’s analysis of Bourdieu. 14. Andrea Allard and Katie Wright, Deakin University, Jane Kenway, Monash University, Alison Mackinnon, Elizabeth Bullen and Danni Sexton-Nicholas, University of South Australia.
re fe re nce s Adkins, L. (2000) ‘Objects of innovation: Post-occupational reflexivity and retraditionalisations of gender’, in S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil and B. Skeggs (eds) Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, pp. 258–272. London: Routledge. Adkins, L. (2002a) ‘Reflexivity: freedom or habit of gender? Feminists evaluate Bourdieu’, paper presented at ‘After Bourdieu: Feminists evaluate Bourdieu, Conference, University of Manchester, 11 October, URL(accessed?)http:// les.mac.ac.uk/sociology/Seminar/afterbourdieu.shtm Adkins, L. (2002b) Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Allard (2005) ‘Capitalizing on Bourdieu: how useful are concepts of “social capital” and “social field” for researching “marginalized” young women’? Theory and Research in Education 3(1): 63–79. Allard, A. and McLeod, J. (2003) ‘“To stay or to go?” “At risk” young women speak about their influences and experiences in making decisions about postcompulsory schooling’, Proceedings of the Conference of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, Adelaide, September. Arnot, M. (2002) Reproducing Gender? Essays on Educational Theory and Feminist Politics. London: Routledge. Ball, S., Maguire, M. and Macrae, S. (2000) Choice, Pathways and Transitions Post 16: New Youth, New Economies in the Global City. London: Routledge Falmer Press. Bourdieu, P. (1976a) ‘Systems of education and systems of thought’, in R. Dale, G. Esland and M. MacDonald Schooling and Capitalism: A Sociological Reader, pp. 192–200. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1976b) ‘The school as a conservative force: scholastic and cultural inequalities’, in R. Dale, G. Esland and M. MacDonald Schooling and Capitalism: A Sociological Reader, pp. 110–17. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993) ‘Concluding remarks for a sociogenetic understanding of intellectual works’, in C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma and M. Postone (eds) Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1999) ‘Understanding’, in P. Bourdieu et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, pp. 607–26. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001) Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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b i o g ra p h i ca l n o t e j u l i e m c l e o d is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Deakin University, Australia. She teaches in educational studies, gender and education and social justice and difference. Her research and publications are in the fields of gender and youth studies, feminism and education, and poststructural and cultural studies perspectives in educational research. She co-edited Researching Youth (2000, Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies) and co-authored a report for the Australian Commonwealth Government, Factors Influencing the Educational Performance of Males and Females at School and their Initial Destinations after Leaving School (2000). She is currently completing a book with Lyn Yates on their qualitative longitudinal study of young people aged from 12 to 18, Making Modern Lives: Subjectivity, Schooling and Social Change (SUNY Press). Correspondence to: Julie McLeod, Faculty of Education, Deakin University, Burwood 3125, Victoria, Australia. [email:
[email protected]]
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