Class, Culture and the Predicaments of Masculine Domination - Encountering Pierre Bourdieu

British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 25, No. 4, September 2004

Class, culture and the `predicaments of masculine domination': encountering Pierre Bourdieu Jo-Anne Dillabough*

University of British Columbia, Canada

This paper seeks to outline and evaluate Pierre Bourdieu's work as it has appeared most recently in feminist studies and the ®eld of gender and education. In particular, it suggests ways in which Bourdieu's theoretical insights could be seen to more effectively contribute to cutting edge debates in both social theory and feminist thought regarding concepts such as agency, identity and domination. It also argues that a more creative and empirical engagement with the recent work of Bourdieu, alongside an interdisciplinary reading of more recent cultural and social theories of power, would be a fruitful way forward in advancing a feminist sociology of education. In the present historical moment and against the tide of postmodern and post-structuralist feminist accounts, Bourdieu is often read as a determinist who has little to offer contemporary feminist debates or who argues that masculine domination is too tightly woven to social practices of a given ®eld. In short, this paper argues that such a view is not only a misreading of Bourdieu's work on fundamental theoretical grounds, but fails to acknowledge the ways in which his more recent work on masculinity addresses both the cultural and social conditions underlying contemporary forms of symbolic domination. In short, the paper argues that Bourdieu's theory offers an analytical breadth and range beyond the scope of anything that a normative, liberal account of masculine domination could provide. Yet, in drawing from such diversity, Bourdieu's oeuvre is able to resist incomprehensibility. It stands as a highly focused, realistic and generative attempt (McNay, 1999; McLeod, 2004) to chart the problems of subordination, differentiation and hierarchy, and to expose the possibilities, as well as the limits, of gendered self-hood.

Introduction Being included, as a man or women, [¼] we have embodied the historical structures of the masculine order in the form of unconscious schemes of perception and appreciation.

(Bourdieu, 1998a, p. 5) Educational institutions may be central to Bourdieu's concerns, but both his sense of disappointment and his critical analysis are more wide reaching. All the institutions of *Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Email: jdillabo@interchange.ubc.ca ISSN 0142±5692(print)/ISSN 1465±3346 (online)/04/040489-18 ã 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0142569042000236970

490 J.-A. Dillabough modernity [¼] share in a tendency to [¼] present themselves as working for the common good, but in fact reproduce social inequalities. They present themselves as agents of freedom, but in fact are organizations of power. (Calhoun, 2003, p. 6)

Throughout his academic career, Pierre Bourdieu sought to address theoretical questions about the nature of domination and, more particularly in his later work, the ways in which masculine privilege may be identi®ed to greater or lesser degrees in all social ®elds. However, beginning in the 1990s, following a sustained interest in Althusser's position on `ideological subjection', Bourdieu (1990) argued that gender domination has perhaps its most substantial effect on/in the social `institutions of modernity' where the cultural reproduction of the social order is a key national project. Bourdieu gave particularly close attention to education, conceiving it as a central ideological and cultural site of socialization that, he argued, was often more likely to reproduce, rather than challenge, social inequality in the state. In this understanding, masculine domination is made possible and understood through historically inherited state formations and practices of cultural production (see Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Bourdieu's work has much to say, therefore, about gender as a social construct and current understandings of masculinity in the state. Indeed, in more recent years, many gender theorists in education have been particularly attentive to Bourdieu's theory of cultural production as the primary tool for understanding the regulation and reproduction of masculine domination and social inequality in society.1 This article is devoted to a critical discussion of, and constructive elaboration upon, Bourdieu's theoretical position on the nature of symbolic/masculine domination as it relates to the study of gender differentiation, particularly (although not exclusively) in educational contexts.

In the sub®eld of education, many of Bourdieu's ideas about symbolic/masculine domination have been combined with more pragmatic feminist concerns about gender inequalities in schools and society (for example, Reay, 1998; Ball et al., 2000).

Such a combination has been particularly fruitful in directing attention to that which Bourdieu eloquently referred to as the `constancy of structure' in gender relationsÐa theorization of how social relations and `categories of understanding' about `sex' and `gender' (see Bourdieu, 1998a) reproduce a gendered division of labour in which elements of constancy and ¯uctuation come together, are embodied in the consciousness of political subjects, and enacted through class relations in education (see Reay, 1998). An educational concern with cultural reproduction, paradoxically dating back to the work of Paul Willis (1977) and others, has therefore always been more than a rigid meta-theoretical project. It has stood as an attempt to engage in what Fraser and Gordon (1997) have referred to as a `critical political semantic' of the modern problematic of social inequality. Such a commitment to a political semantics of social inequality asserts that micro-negotiations in local contexts and macro processes of society and culture need to be seen as dialectically related in any analysis of, or intepretation, of social reproduction.

Within the broader compass of what might be called `social analysis', Bourdieu's work has ignited debate in a number of key areas. The most pressing of these include:

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the recognition of social structure and social class as salient factors impinging upon gender categories within the con®guration of educational and social inequality; the validity, for understanding the diversity of educational and social experiences for women and men, of Bourdieu's sophisticated conceptual apparatus, which brings together the concepts of habitus, cultural capital and ®eld; and, more recently, the extent to which the effects of masculine domination may be seen to apply to the experiences of differently located males and females in schools and society. Such debates have resumed some force in recent years, despite the powerful attractions of postmodernist concerns and approaches in engaging contemporary educational debates, and in the face of some rather ferocious continental criticisms of Bourdieu's more recent work (see Mottier, 2002; McLeod, 2004). Bourdieu's principal theoretical tenet for engaging with this range of debates is that symbolic domination shapes and organizes the sociocultural conditions of gender equality. As Curtis and Chodos (2002) write: Bourdieu attempted to mobilize the [¼] conceptual repetoire he had developed over several decades to make sociology into an effective instrument of political critique. [¼] Such a sociology would embrace its enemy ±domination ± mastering its characteristic idioms, its strategies and tactics, its feints and gestures, and turn the strength of domination against itself. (2002, p. 1)

Despite the conceptual power of Bourdieu's work and its more recent revival in theoretical debate, it is certainly true that the sociological impulse in theories of cultural reproduction subsided in the late 1980s in gender studies and education. This decline of interest may have been related to inherent dif®culties in deriving coherent and sustainable positions from Bourdieu's theorizing, which has often attracted the charge of succumbing to meta-narrativist abstraction and forms of sociological scientism (see Jenkins, 2002). Bourdieu's work has, nevertheless, continued to contribute powerfully in suggesting new theoretical directions for the sociology of education. Most recently, for example, feminist educational scholars have attempted to incorporate Bourdieu's notion of habitus within their accounts of the tensions between schools and family life (Reay, 1998). They have also striven to understand how educational knowledge and the structure of work in education have been shaped by historical legacies of masculine domination in relation to globalization (see Dillabough & Acker, 2002).

Bourdieu has also proved to be a particularly astute guide in helping to identify the complex social processes implicated in intersecting axes of inequality (class, race and gender), in order to challenge liberal and essentializing theories of gender identity.

Indeed, theorists (see McLeod, 2004) who have moved beyond the class constraints of gender have broadened Bourdieu's reach by extending the depth of the relationship between class con¯ict and other axes of identi®cation. In recent years, Bourdieu's work has also served as an important mechanism for explaining large-scale class shifts and novel forms of social equality consequent upon globalization (see Bourdieu, 1998b). A recurring argument has been that education continues to be governed by elites, whether traditional or new. This claim calls for recognition of a sociocultural relationship between educational structures, the cultural formation of class--

492 J.-A. Dillabough consciousness and identities, and the potential for, or limits of, social mobility for females and males. At the core of this relationship stand masculine formations that have developed across time, and that privilege (through symbolic culture and institutional life) white middle-class boys and girls above all other identities (see Dillabough, 2003). What is central to each of these perspectives/approaches to social analyses is that gender/social inequities represent an interaction between the social practices of cultural production (e.g. notion of society as symbolic culture) and the conditions of structural change.

In short, Bourdieu's sociological account has made considerable gains for educational theory by responding precisely to the limitations inhering within liberal, post-structuralist and strong marxist views of power. Bourdieu's interdisciplinary perspective, in¯ected in part through feminist reproduction theory, holds out the prospect of moving beyond such limitations. Within a framework concerned with the processes of cultural production, gender inequality can no longer be attached to a singular explanatory factor, such as the economy, or male culture in and of itself.

Rather, Bourdieu offered a more subtle explanation that embraced the complex interrelationship of culture and structure and endowed this relationship with preeminent status in shaping the conditions of freedom.2 Morover, Bourdieu's account of language and symbolic power has materially assisted in the task of exploring, at the level of the state, how the social relations of communication can also be seen as cultural relations of symbolic power, which are embedded in a masculinized social history (Bourdieu, 1999; Mottier, 2002). Bourdieu's model has therefore alerted us to a broad range of educational issues for the advancement of social equality that other educational theorists could not address as effectivelyÐfor example, exclusion in schools, the study of economically disadvantaged male and female youth in globalizing times, and the disintegration of social welfare states (see Bourdieu, 1998b).

Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction and classi®cation struggles Perhaps the point at which Bourdieu's work has been most in¯uential is in his conceptualization of cultural production as a conceptual framework for understanding how social inequality becomes constant (constancy of structure) and manifestly presentÐas meaningful cultural practiceÐin school and social life. The term `cultural production' refers to sociocultural processes in a given social ®eld that regulate and shape hierarchical mechanisms of the social order. These processes are grounded in communicative forms of culture (e.g. conversations) yet they remain premised upon an understanding of the state as strati®ed. Particularly in Bourdieu's early work, such processes were seen to operate as naturalized cultural forms in the realm of phenomenological and hermeneutic experience.

Individuals in this strati®ed context therefore engage, through embodied social practice, in what Bourdieu has insightfully named `classi®cation struggles'. These struggles are not reactions to an unchanging and rigid political economy nor are they a response to `observable' state forms of governance such as neo-liberal social policy.

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Rather, such struggles are a response to inherited and pre-existing sets of sociocultural relations and conditions that are hierarchically framed yet ultimately dynamic. The power and signi®cance of the term `classi®cation struggle' is that it implicates individuals in both the production of culture and social relations of symbolic power.

There is, in Bourdieu's eyes, no legitimate split or polarization between the passive `I am', `I was', `I can do', `I will be' and `we are' (see Archer, 2000, p. 36). As Bourdieu writes: The social world is [¼] something which agents make at every moment; but they have no chance of unmaking and remaking it except on the basis of realistic knowledge of what it is and of what they can do to it by virtue of the position they occupy in it. (2001, p. 74)

Surprisingly, perhaps, the spaces occupied by such positions, not so unlike conceptions of `space' offered by Doreen Massey, are imbued with power, symbolism, and hermeneutic signi®cance in an `ever shifting social geometry of power and signi®cation' (Massey, 1994, p. 3; Massey, 1999). The social practices of cultural reproduction do not therefore simply replicate existing or pre-existing forms of inequality. Cultural practice has a unique role in both subverting and reconstituting what Bourdieu has called the `constancy of structure in education'Ðthe persistence of state formations of social inequality that have been inherited from the past and that continue to be reshaped over time: `l'effet de la domination symbolique ne s'exerce pas dan la logique pure des consciences connaissantes, mais dans l'obscurite des schemes practiques de l'habitus, ou est inscrite, souvent inaccessible auz prises de la conscience relexive et auz controles de la volente, la relation de domination' (Bourdieu, 1990, as cited in Lovell, 2000, p. 17).

Bourdieu thus sought to make explicit the relationship between culture, materiality and experience in the formation of domination through the study and acquisition of habituality (see Bourdieu, 1997), following what Husserl had named `Habitualitat'. This focus on the `Habitualitat' was to be primarily concerned with a study of the ways in which the social order is reproduced through the cultural practices of individuals who carry with them the phenomenological burden of their embeddedness and social experience. Habits and forms of masculine privilege are therefore shaped, in part, through the normative architecture of culture and what Lovell (2000) terms the `cultural arbitrary'. What is important here is the reference to social practice as a form of ideological exposure and hermeneutic understanding; habitus is a social formation wherein individuals take on forms of practical sense (see Reay, present issue). Habitus, as Lovell writes: `is indicated in the bearing of the body (hexis) and in deeply ingrained habits of behavior, feeling and thought' (2000, p. 12). Such deeply sedimented (see McNay, 2000) forms of embodiment are the primary yet still tacit elements of invisible pedagogy (see Bernstein, 1997) in the social world, which operate through, for example, family life and restructure the social order. This embodiment of the gender order is thought to occur through what Bourdieu earlier referred to as `bodily hexis' as a symbolic form of power (Arnot, 1982).

494 J.-A. Dillabough Masculine domination and the sociology of education Prior to the cultural turn in social thought, one of the most in¯uential approaches for the study of gender issues in education was `the reproduction' or `code' model (see also Arnot, 2002). This approach holds that structuresÐlargely economicÐshape state governance and social institutions and exert masculine power through capitalist relations. Feminists interested in these ideas therefore equated capitalist relations with forms of patriarchy and identi®ed such social relations in the structures of schooling (e.g. gendered school subjects).

While Bourdieu certainly has a good deal to say to this tradition, he was perhaps more interested in identifying how symbolic culture and structure intersect to reproduce social and educational inequality. He was also concerned with the ways in which cultural relations in any given site shape dispositions (identity formations), which accommodate or resist domination or function together to enact both simultaneously. While the concept of domination was central for Bourdieu, when he linked this term with masculinity or the social conditions of domination, he precisely exposed the links between culture and structure in the process of reproduction. `Masculine domination' is a term that has emerged from this articulation even though, by contrast with its analytical utility, its rhetorical tone may echo more straightforwardly economic or objectivist models of power.

What perhaps made Bourdieu appear to some as an essentialist thinker in relation to gender categories was that he often argued that gender domination could be named as `masculine', even if his concerns with masculinity in fact cut across social formations of race, class, and disability3 (see Bourdieu, 1990a, 1990b, 1998a, 1998b). Indeed, his more recent concern with embodied forms of gendered domination highlight his contemporary af®liation with the body, knowledge, society and culture: `it has to be posited that social agents are endowed with habitus, inscribed in their bodies by past experience ¼ the agent is never completely the subject of his/[her] practices: through the dispositions and the belief which are the basis of engagement in the game, all the presuppositions constituting the practical axiomatics of the ®eld (the epistemic doxa, for example) ®nd their way into the seemingly most lucid intentions' (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 138). Yet his notion, as Lovell (2000) suggests, of gender performativity (or the embodiment and expression of social relations) is not about simply transgressing authority. Rather, his view of the performance of masculinity has an anti-essentialist character in that male domination can be traced to historical ideas that are embodied by social actors in the present. It is not simply a straightforward or objective derivative of contemporary social and cultural power formations. Arbitrary enactments of masculine domination are expressed and, therefore, to be read differently through social structures, discourses, relations and bodily representations (see Bourdieu, 1998a; Lovell, 2000). Such relations are often hidden and dif®cult to expose yet they are present in different forms and at different moments in history: the objective structures and cognitive structures of a particularly well preserved androcentric society (such as Kabyle society as I observed in the early 60's) provides

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instruments enabling one to understand some of the best concealed aspects of what those relations are in the economically most advanced societies. (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 7)

What is crucial and distinctive about Bourdieu's notion of masculinized discourse is that it is characterized as contingent; it depends upon a structural and communicative culture for its operation and expression. Whereas some postmodern accounts of discourse create a disjuncture between discourse and experience, Bourdieu and other social theorists (Caverero, McNay, Smith) who have maintained a connection to hermeneutic concerns focus instead on the relation between the self (as inherited and dialectically shaped dispositions), material society, and experience in the formation and circulation of discourse. These relationships are not always temporal. As Adriana Caverero writes: `the time of a life story is not reducible to the ``time'' of that life'. And as Caverero (2000) declares, with Ulysses and Achilles in mind, `the life story of the hero belongs to a temporality different from the lifespan of that hero' (p. 3). Like Caverero, then, Bourdieu's approach is highly sensitive to history, pre-existing social structures and the discursive manifestation of discourse, its form, its content, its experiential dimension and its materialityÐall of which are dialectical in form (see McNay, 2000). Similarly, the time of masculine domination is also not simply reducible to the time in which it is enacted or expressed (see Dillabough & van der Meulen, under review). In this way, masculine discourse(s) (e.g. public, private) cannot be seen, on their own, as a straightforwardly measurable, objective form of inequality. Rather, they are manifested, embodied and naturalized in social and cultural spaceÐas social and cultural history and as habitus: `the habitus appears in one sense as each individual's characteristic set of dispositions for action. [¼] But the habitus [¼]is [also] the meeting point between institutions or bodies ¼ the way in which persons connect with the socio-cultural in such a way that the various games of life keep their meaning, keep being played' (Calhoun, 2003, p. 17).

Masculine domination is embodied in language, texts, knowledge, policies, human practices and in notions of that which constitutes the legitimate political subject. In this way, Bourdieu does not attempt to argue for a ®xed notion of male or female selfhood, but rather for the portrayal of a highly constrained individual who does not occupy the elusive liberal position of being able to choose whether they will oppress or not. Forms of domination are naturalized to the extent that they are both unconscious and sometimes unrecognizable; and they are resisted to the extent that resistance becomes possible within a sociocultural frame of constraints. As Mottier (2002) argues, `masculine domination' is concerned largely with the naturalization of symbolic forms of masculine power, the `misrecognition of domination, and the mechanisms of social reproduction of this domination' (p. 352).

If we are to assess the signi®cance of Bourdieu's work for social and feminist theorists, I would argue that his account of masculine domination has served some useful purposes. First, in contrast to strong marxist accounts of inequality that, in the early 1980s, concerned themselves largely with class (see Robbins, 2002),4 Bourdieu does not view patriarchy or masculine domination as a singular system of economic oppression. His more comprehensive account of gender inequality has allowed

496 J.-A. Dillabough feminist sociologists, in particular, to move beyond purely economic accounts toward a more sociocultural understanding of gender inequality and educational institutions (see McLeod, 2004).

Second, in emphasizing a relationship between culture and the economy, Bourdieu remained committed, in part, to a symbolic labour theory of the state whereby the sexual division of labourÐas part of an accumulated historyÐmight be seen to play a framing role in the cultural production of gender inequality. Culture cannot therefore be eclipsed at the expense of a history of labour in any analysis of masculine domination: this noting of the trans-historical continuity of the relation of masculine domination [¼] forces us to pose the always ignored question of the endlessly recommenced historical labour which is necessary [¼] to wrench masculine domination from history ¼ Above all, it forces one to see the futility of the strident calls of `postmodern' philosophers for the `supersession of dualisms'. These dualisms, deeply rooted in things (structures) and in bodies, do not spring from the simple effect of verbal naming and cannot be abolished by an act of performative magic, since the genders, far from being simple roles to be played at will, are inscribed in bodies and in a universe from which they derive their strength.

(Bourdieu, 1998a, pp. 102-103)

Third, this emphasis on the contingency of dualisms and social structure in understanding the cultural production of masculine domination exposes the historical role of the sexual division of labour in the augmentation and maintenance of symbolic capital and its gendered expression through habitus. As a consequence, the idea of men or women as agents of oppression emerges as problematic and we see, through Bourdieu's eyes, the substantially constrained social actor located in a cultural milieu, an actor who has been shaped to act out and perform particular kinds of domination and, where possible, to subvert them.5 Fourth, `gender(s)'Ðas sexually characterized habitusÐmay not be viewed as straightforwardly biological, material or essential, but as something complex, historical and fundamentally cultural in form. But Bourdieu desired, as far as was possible, to objectify the practices of masculine domination that had become naturalized. He drew upon meaning-making, power formations, legacy and the history of ideas to achieve this task.

If it is quite illusory to believe that symbolic violence can be overcome with the weapons of consciousness and will alone, this is because the effect and conditions of its ef®cacy are durably and deeply embedded in the body in the form of dispositions. This is seen [¼] in the case of relations of kinship and all relations built on that model, in which these durable inclinations of the socialized body are expressed and experienced in the logic of feeling (®lial love, fraternal love) or duty, which are often merged in the experience of respect and devotion and may live on long after the disappearance of their social conditions of production. (Bourdieu, 1998a, p. 39)

Here we begin to see the extent to which forms of domination are built into everyday cultural life and which might be understood as an `invisible culture' (see also Moore, 2003), which carries with it the `hypnotic power of domination' (Woolf, cited in Bourdieu, 1998a). In this way, masculine domination can be seen to permeate the

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cultural ®elds or space of social institutions locally, without surrendering the importance of the wide cultural and structural context that shape individuals' actions.

Fifth, Bourdieu's account fully engages structure alongside his concentration on determining the role of culture in the generation of meanings (see also McNay, 2000; McLeod & Kenway, 2004). As Lovell (2002) suggests, the range of such meanings is not inexhaustible. The idea of meaning as constantly proliferating beyond a material social reality is where Bourdieu takes issue with the post-structural perspective. In his view, postmodernist and post-structuralist accounts of masculine domination are poorly equipped to acknowledge the material elements inhering in experience, meaning and interpretation, and therefore fail to see that any interpretive reading of masculine domination cannot take place outside of actual social practice or a recognition of power relations. To see masculine domination outside of its historical legacy and context is to objectify it (as a liberal entity) in ways which no longer make it possible to understand it as a embedded representational knowledge form.

Finally, and of even greater signi®cance, is Bourdieu's explicit recognition of the sociocultural relationship between discourse and differentiation. It is crucially important here to recognize that Bourdieu did not reject discourse as something that shaped the forms of masculine domination in operation. Rather, he suggested that postmodern notions of discourse were sometimes misleading because they failed to acknowledge the part played by discourse in the material processes of social differentiationÐthe observable forms of differentiation that actually assert symbolic power and domination in social life (e.g. sexual division of labour, exclusion of women from the workforce). Bourdieu instead saw discourse as one of many social processes that contribute to social differentiation. It was therefore legitimate to be concerned with discourse in the Foucauldian (as a language±power relation) sense, but this should not diminish the practical and ethical importance of understanding what the outcome of that discourse might mean in a material and social sense. Discourse is, in other words, grounded in social/material relations and not simply text without historical memory or social meaning, nor can it be extracted out of the realm of social experience.

Enlarged selves, masculine domination and Bourdieu's `philosophy of the subject' The individual [is] the locus of indissoluble identityÐat least potentially self-suf®cient, self-contained and self-moving. (Calhoun, 1995, p. 254)

As I have suggested thus far, Bourdieu cannot be portrayed or appropriated as a post-structural theorist, even though he respected many aspects of Foucault's work in his more recent writings. Yet some who have drawn upon Bourdieu have often overlapped with the conceptual apparatus of culture and discourse, and poststructural/cultural theories of power (see Lovell, 2000; McNay, 2000; McCleod, 2004). Indeed, incursions into the modern project of gender through the destabilizing category of culture have been a consistent concern for feminist/cultural

498 J.-A. Dillabough reproduction theorists. Reproductive accounts of cultureÐas in the early work of Willis or McRobbieÐallowed some later feminist reproduction theorists and cultural theorists the possibility of viewing gender identity as ontologically more complex than liberal theorists or strong modernist accounts had previously suggested. Linking class to culture has therefore been an important mechanism for extending our understanding of the legitimate political subject as `who' rather than a `what' in the descriptive sense (see also Arendt, 1958). As Arendt writes (as cited in Zerilli, 1995): `the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words'. Yet `the speech of action resists such formalisms because it is fundamentally ambiguous and exceeds symbolic signi®cance', if always in sight of it. `In contrast to sign language', Arendtian speech remains close to the body as a symptom, to the semiotic, to that which is `heterogenous to meaning and signi®cation' (Zerilli, 1995, p. 180). Not unlike Arendt's concerns with the actor, then, it is in this way that issues of gender identity and self-hood emerge, if rather inconspicuously, as both an embodiment of culture and as symbolic symptom of the social order throughout the theoretical work of Bourdieu. Gender theorists would perhaps do well to begin to focus more closely upon these elements of Bourdieu's theoretical legacy. I would argue that it is here that Bourdieu not only begins to offer insight into the philosophy of the subject on sociological grounds (a much neglected debate), but also sheds light on a theoretical notion of identity that does not foreclose action or agency, yet accepts that such notions can never be seen as unconstrained action, as masculine fetish or as individual acts of liberal freedom.

While respectful of some post-structural accounts, Bourdieu argues that poststructural representations of self-hood pay little attention to issues of experience and the real subjects through whom language and power are generated (see also Lovell, 2000). In so doing, some post-structuralists do not seize the opportunity to advance a theory of identity that might explain how it is that some individuals appear to assert greater levels of `freedom' and `agency' than others, and are therefore in a social position precisely to articulate and assert their `freedoms'. Bourdieu's point, I believe, is that no one is ultimately free. Individuals are certainly bound by the conditions of their political, economic and cultural circumstances. But if they have greater privilege in the state (based on their social location; e.g. race, gender and class), they will appear in the liberal democratic framework as penultimately `freer' than other more historically marginalized groups.

In this way, we can begin to view self-hood as something bound by social conditions rather than determined by them. Bourdieu therefore brings a larger and more relevant sociological account of the gendered self to debates about the philosophy of the subject. He does not, for example, reject the importance of viewing the self as both actor and subject in the shaping of culture and the embodiment of those social practices that lead to both inequality and subversion. Rather, he endows subjects with the capacity to act in the social world without claiming a totalizing agency or an illusory, essentialist notion of freedom. This amounts to a particularly relevant epistemological account of the self for feminist theorists. Eichner (2001), for example, asserts a similar point in expressing her concern over the limitations of a

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strong feminist post-structuralist account of female identity, as offered by Drucilla Cornell: [¼] she is a woman who appears completely removed from a system in which she was formed. [¼] Absent from both poles of Cornell's work is any discussion of the political and social conditions necessary to ensure that women reinterpret their own lived realities in their attempt to understand the linguistic operation of power. (Eichner, 2001, p. 25)

If we are to respect the integrity of Bourdieu's concern with the symbolic aspects of masculine domination, then we must acknowledge the role that pre-existing social contexts play in the shaping or grounding of the self in a gendered history. Gender identity, in this way, is always contingent, as indeed is the subversion of dominant or hegemonic understandings of gender in the ideological sense. Masculine domination thus operates to shape identities at multiple levels: `it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction' (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 23). Therefore, against those who might argue that Bourdieu failed to address debates about the `subject', I would argue that his contribution was to precisely designed to avoid `an account of the subject' and to instead articulate the conditions upon which the subject might be seen to be formed and reconstituted. It is toward these conditions and forms of meaning generated about the subject that Bourdieu turned rather than the formal development of a theory of the self per se (Mcleod, 2004). Rather, his fundamental interest was in the development of a theory of power that did not bind his sociology of masculinity to liberal accounts of the subject.

My own view is that feminist reproduction theorists and `education feminists' were at their most successful in using Bourdieu's work to challenge liberal philosophical conceptions of gender identity, as well as biological understandings of self-hood. The challenge offered by feminist reproduction theorists to modern individualism and gendered notions of self-hood was achieved largely through a relational view of culture, class relations and identity, transcending modern male ®ctions of self-hood.6 Consequently, what we learn from Bourdieu on philosophical grounds about the signi®cance of the self is that context, conditions and culture (including the symbolic economy) combine to shape all individualsÐdiverse women, men, children, the wealthy, economically disadvantaged, minority ethnic communitiesÐthrough their understandings of themselves and others, as well as through the hierarchies of privilege within which they are embedded. Masculine domination, then, is not located always in one site and neither is it the sole property of men, just as the simple assertion of selfhood does not necessarily constitute an `act of domination' (see Butler, 1997) or a linguistic performance of naming. Bourdieu writes: `the work of symbolic construction is far more than a strictly performative operation of naming which orients and structures representations, starting with representations of the body. It is brought about and culminates in a profound and durable transformation of bodies (and minds)' (2001, p. 23). From Bourdieu's perspective, masculine privileging is a social relation, although not of an ungrounded, free-¯oating or indeterminant kind. In this respect it is not dissimilar to Foucault's emphasis on the idea of relationality

500 J.-A. Dillabough (Foucault, 1986), although without the sacri®ce of context, class relations, legacy and contingency. Bourdieu argued for a pre-existing and organized understanding of sociocultural life that is grounded not only in cultural identi®cation, but also in the macro process of differentiation. He avers that: Like Michele Foucault, who sought to rehistoricize sexuality against psychoanalytic naturalization, by describing, in a History of Sexuality, conceived of [¼] as a genealogy of Western Man [¼], I have tried [¼] to link the unconscious which governs sexual relations, and the relations between the sexes [¼] to the long and partly immobile history of the androcentric unconscious. But to carry through the project of understanding what it is that speci®cally characterizes the modern experience of sexuality, it is not suf®cient, as Foucault supposed, to emphasize what differentiates it in particular from Greek or Roman antiquity [¼] Sexuality [¼] is indeed a historical invention, but one which has developed progressively as the various ®elds and their speci®c logics became differentiated. (Bourdieu, 1998b, pp. 103±104)

The key to Bourdieu's sociocultural material analysis, then, is his subtle understanding of the symbolic relationship between the circulation of gender myths (as grounded and contingent discourse) through the making and re-making of culture (i.e. the production of culture) and the processes of social differentiation (Moi, 1991).

Conclusions Assessing Bourdieu's theory: strengths and limitations for the future of feminist studies As I have argued throughout, Bourdieu intended masculine domination to be understood in a broad and comprehensive sense within a theory of cultural production. However, his emphasis more recently on masculinity as the pivotal form of domination tended to direct attention away from an analysis of the role of broader social movements and social location in recon®guring more complex and nuanced understandings of domination (see Curtis and Chodos, 2002; Mottier, 2002; McCleod, 2004). Consequently, gender and class have remained privileged conceptual ideas, sometimes standing above other sociocultural formations, such as race and sexuality. While Bourdieu maintained a passionate stance on political subversion, it could be argued that his own understanding of social movements, including feminist thought and its evolution, was somewhat limited and rather dated, as was his broad acceptance of race and post-colonial critiques of sociological theory.

With that said, it is unwarranted to suggest that Bourdieu's attempt at developing a nuanced understanding of domination was wholly unsuccessful. To his credit, Bourdieu did not privilege groups or individuals in assigning them types or magnitudes of domination. His own belief was that all groups are, to greater or lesser degrees, responding to a gendered habitus premised upon differentiated forms of domination. In other words, he did not argue that women, gay/lesbian and transgendered and/or racialized groups were more or less inclined to dominate.

Rather, he exposed the structures of domination to which less privileged groups were exposed, and attempted to show how all social subjects come to embody, albeit in diverse ways, such structures in everyday social practice. In this way, he was able to

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move beyond the liberal problematic of identity politics and the privileging of one identity over another to expose the structural and psychic dimensions of domination that are normalized through a habitus. His central argument was that we have an ethical obligation to understand the sociocultural structures that lead to a hierarchy of privilege over time. In this sense, he was able to move very successfully beyond liberal accounts of the acceptable political subject or simple binaries between man and woman or white and black, exposing instead the sociocultural processes that reproduce hierarchy, differentiation and inequality.

It could also be argued that, particularly within feminist sociological accounts drawing on Bourdieu, women retain their dignity as social actors. Bourdieu does not wish us to assume that women are incapable of acting (as subversive) on the discourses and forms of communication that reproduce masculine domination. In Bourdieu's mind, women are always actors in some form or another. For a male scholar who spent a lifetime dispelling the liberal myths of agency and freedom, but not of action, this is a profoundly important commitment. But Bourdieu does not wish us to imagine that women are `free unfettered authors of their own destiny' (see Weir, 1997; McNay, 2000). Here, he shows us his mark as a scholar of remarkable depth and interdisciplinary insight; he not only confronts the sociocultural organization of the state, but also its role in the shaping, both epistemologically and practically, of the gendered self.

Yet we must be wary, as Lovell (2000) suggests, not to use Bourdieu's account of masculine domination merely to construct women as `capital bearing objects' who can be easily located in the private, or as non-citizens who simply possess sexualized capital in relation to the formations of masculinity and femininity. For Lovell (2000), Bourdieu's account is in danger of constructing women as objects of the market and of a highly sexualized state. To the degree that this is so, Bourdieu may have strayed towards a contradiction of his own theorization of the relationship between subject and object in the formation of gendered dispositions.

A related concern about work inspired by Bourdieu's insights is that it is heavily marked by an emphasis on meta-theory at the expense of accounting for difference.

Indeed, many have felt that accounts that remained focused on class relations as a form of reproduction could not convincingly address issues of difference beyond gender and class (see Dillabough, 2001). Bourdieu is therefore sometimes read as a totalizing theorist of masculine domination as well as proffering a meta-account of female subordination. An overarching criticism, then, remains that feminist reproduction theory was too deterministic in focus, failing to account for the micronegotiations of identity and change in schools and society, as well as demonstrating an inability to look beyond gender and class for more complex explanations of social inequality. Cornell writes: `different women are differently situated with respect to power: while white women may experience oppression on account of their sex, they also share privilege on account of their race' (cited in Eichner, 2001, p. 11).

Bourdieu's own oeuvre would have therefore greatly bene速ted from a stronger analysis of race and colonialism in the symbolic production of masculine domination.

While it is undoubted that Bourdieu was committed to such issues, it seems short-

502 J.-A. Dillabough sighted to leave such topics underdeveloped in the larger theoretical dialogue about intersecting axes of domination, and the impact they have on social practices of cultural reproduction. Yet Bourdieu remains one of the very few sociologists to recognize the theoretical tensions between structure and culture in both the shaping of society and the self. He was interested in the reproduction and recon速guration of cultural meaning across time rather than the `slippage of meaning' (see Eichner, 2001). History, materiality, nature and culture are therefore inseparable in the study of self, society and other (see McLeod, 2003). At this crossroads, Bourdieu's work contrasts markedly with that of Michel Foucault, Delueze, Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida.

Bourdieu's theory represented a sociocultural account of masculine domination designed to expose the processes underlying particular state cultural formations and production, and the ways in which such formations are embodied and acted upon by human actors. In designating individuals as actors in the larger scheme of society, Bourdieu was not implying that subjects necessarily possessed agency. In fact, on philosophical and ontological grounds, Bourdieu was quite clear that selves were not free. Hence his interest in domination as the conceptual tool he privileged in a lifelong critique of society. His intention was instead to demonstrate the part played by individuals in enacting domination as an embodied reality even if they themselves were not fully aware that they were engaged in such domination. Essentially, this kind of theory provides an explanation of how domination becomes practically possible, at the same moment that it appears ethically unthinkable as conscious practice.

This kind of theoretical orientation also exposes how changing modes of cultural production establish, but do not predict, the limits within which gender identities (e.g. female worker identities) may develop and take shape in society, as well as the actions of educational and social institutions towards them. This is why feminist sociological accounts of the relationship between cultural reproduction and masculine domination have offered one of few sociocultural frameworks with suf速cient theoretical and analytical subtlety to elaborate sophisticated understandings of identity and its link to both the regulation and reproduction of gender inequality in education (see, for example, Reay, present issue; McNay, 2000). This claim is not made to undermine the more recent proliferation of gender/cultural theories of education. Rather, it suggests the need to re-engage with the theoretical value of Bourdieu's work as it might relate to the broader range of theories currently circulating and through which it might stimulate further novel contributions to the study of gender in education, as well as broader historical, philosophical and feminist sociocultural theories. Here I am particularly thinking of the work of Dorreen Massey, Hannah Arendt, Terry Lovell, Cindy Katz, Joan Sangster, Allison Weir, Lois Waquant, Lois Mcnay (see Mcleod [2004] for some elaboration), and Paul Ricoeur.

We must also continue, as Bourdieu suggested throughout his academic life, to engage in acts of historization so that we can begin to trace the naturalization of symbolic culture over time and understand the reproduction of domination at both the symbolic and ontological level (see Dillabough & van der Meulen, under review, 2003). This kind of theoretical practice has not been the trend in recent years largely

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as a consequence of the ways in which culture has been commodi®ed in theory as a tool of higher order analysis in theoretical debates. Yet, I maintain, following E. P. Thompson as well as Bourdieu, that culture, like class, is simultaneously both discursive and strati®ed. However, class cannot be eclipsed by culture and culture ought never to be con¯ated or confounded with class. Class `is a relation', but it must be seen as a contingent relation that possesses substantial symbolic and cultural power. As Thompson (1980, p. 939) famously reminds us: Class is a social and cultural formation which cannot be de®ned abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and ultimately, the de®nition can only be made in the medium of timeÐthat is, action, reaction, change and con¯ict ¼ But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.

To conclude, Bourdieu's theory offers an analytical breadth and range beyond the scope of anything that a normative, liberal account of masculine domination could provide. It touches upon the ®elds of philosophy, hermeneutics, cultural theory, phenomenology, existentialism, sociology, anthropology, and more general and pressing debates about the ontology of the subject. Yet in drawing from such diversity, Bourdieu's oeuvre is able to resist incomprehensibility. It stands as a highly focused, realistic and generative attempt (McNay, 1999; McLeod, 2004) to chart the problems of subordination, differentiation and hierarchy, and to expose the possibilities, as well as the limits, of gendered self-hood. Therefore, if we are to build further upon the accumulated achievements of feminist reproduction theory to date, then continued close and sustained attention to the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu will remain, rightly, of paramount importance for us.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

While some argue that Bourdieu's impact on such ®elds as feminist sociology and feminist studies within an Anglo-Saxon framework has been inconsistent (see Lovell, 2000), his theory of cultural production has been particularly in¯uential in the ®eld of gender and education and substantially impacted those feminists who have remained concerned with the state and class con¯ict as analytical categories (Arnot, 1979; Fraser & Gordon, 1995; Skeggs, 1997; Lovell, 2000; Dillabough & Acker, 2002; McCleod, 2004; Dillabough, 2003; Reay, present issue). One might also argue that we are witnessing a rise in Bourdieu's in¯uence in feminist studies since his publication of Masculine Domination (1998a), particularly in the United Kingdom and continental Europe.

I have used the term `conditions of freedom' to illustrate that I do not argue for a notion of liberal freedom, but rather to set in place an understanding of what Bourdieu meant by a sociology of freedom, a freedom that is accorded to those who are less constrained by the class structure.

Many feminists following Bourdieu have been particularly advanced in their application of Bourdieu's ideas about reproduction when it is applied to issues of race (see Reay and Lucey, 2003). Indeed, I believe that Bourdieu was not explicit enough about race as a political construct.

Robbins argues that Bourdieu distanced himself from hard versions of Marxist theory for over four decades. He writes: `In an article such as ``les sous-proletaire algerians'' (1962), Bourdieu began to argue that Marxist explanation was not universally applicableÐthat the extent to which behavior could be thought to be economically determined was a function of the

504 J.-A. Dillabough

5.

6.

quantity of economic resources at the disposal of different individuals and groups: economically well endowed groups can purchase the means to become independent of economic determinism whereas the behavior of the poor can appear to be economically conditioned' (Robbins, 2002).

This term substantially revised our thinking about the constitution of knowledge and the sociological vision of school structures. Indeed, the idea of knowledge as premised upon diverse forms of masculine privilege imply that power and control are at the centre of knowledge production. Knowledge (like patriarchy) is therefore no longer something that is objecti®able in ways that a pure rationalist might believe. One therefore sees the links between society (and its forms of organizational power) to knowledge and no longer locates domination in one hegemonic site. Many theorists believed Bourdieu to be a straightforward modernist only concerned with state power; however, his own work on the dialectical transformation of masculine domination speaks against such an argument.

I do not wish to argue that post-structuralism is a theoretical position that supports liberalism.

Indeed, many post-structural feminists critique liberal positions. However, without a grounded theory of self-hood that addresses issues of social conditions and context, one is left wondering how such a position might resemble the basic structure of modern individualism.

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