Canadian Journal of Sociology Online January-February 2006
Unlike his philosopher compatriots Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu had little influence on contemporary Anglo-Saxon feminist theory. In the poststructuralist/ postmodern feminist accounts, Bourdieu's sociology is often regarded as a (class) deterministic one, having little to offer to contemporary feminist theories and debates. This is about to change, as there is a notable increase of interest in Bourdieu's work among Anglo-saxon feminist academia, initiated by Toril Moi and Leslie McCall [1] who have explored, among other issues, the relevance of his social theory for feminism and more specifically for the renewal of materialist approaches that have been rather scarce in feminist analyses since the 'linguistic turn'. Hence feminists are increasingly looking to the work of Bourdieu, deploying, recasting, criticising and extending the abundant theoretical resources his sociology offers in order to address the key issues and impasses in contemporary feminist theory.
Rooted in this emergent 'tradition' of feminist engagements with Bourdieu, this volume brings into dialogue leading contemporary feminists some of them Bourdieu scholars like Bridget Fowler, others drawing on his theories more eclectically like Elsbeth Probyn to interrogate the relevance of Bourdieu's theoretical apparatus for feminism. This interrogation is a critical one, for the contributors to this volume are not satisfied by merely situating the objects of feminism within a Bourdieusian framework (Adkins, 5). They do not seek to evaluate whether Bourdieu's theoretical apparatus is congruent with contemporary feminist issues or whether the objects of feminist inquiry fit in his sociology. Instead, they critically engage with Bourdieusian sociology, his methodological stance and the nodal points of his theoretical world.
This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 2002 "Feminists Evaluate Bourdieu" conference held at the University of Manchester. Like any edited volume, editors Lisa Adkins and Bev Skeggs have the challenging task of assembling a diverse array of contributions into a cohesive whole. They achieve this task most perceptively by offering in the introductory section two distinct comprehensive and complementary syntheses. These double introductions make linkages between various conceptual tools and topics covered by eleven contributors. The themes exposed range from Lawler's insightful analysis of media representations of two recent political protests by mothers in Britain to Fowler's remarkable chapter on obituaries.
The aim of this conversation between contemporary feminist theory and Pierre Bourdieu's sociological oeuvre is twofold: evaluating the relevance of Bourdieu's theoretical legacy for feminism and considering the significance of contemporary feminist analyses for a renewed social and cultural theory. Hence, contributors to the volume not only offer comprehensive examinations of Bourdieu's central concepts such as habitus, social field, symbolic violence, bodily hexis and the various forms of capital (social, cultural, symbolic), they also extend the conceptual scope of his thought on a variety of social topics and processes such as domination, social and cultural reproduction, ideology, agency, and practice. For instance, Reay's contribution expands Bourdieu's conceptualisation of capitals to the sphere of emotions, interrogating the ways in which emotional capital may be understood as a distinctively gendered capital and the extent to which social class works upon it. McNay's exploration of agency and experience makes a fruitful comparison between Butler's and Bourdieu's theorizing of social and performative agency and sketches out a possible way to overcome the sterile antagonism between materialist and culturalist feminists (188). Another compelling Butler-Bourdieu contrast is to be found in Lawler's chapter. Her theoretically informed and empirically rich analysis enables her to conclude that neither domination nor resistance can be mapped easily by determinism or agency, since for many dominated groups it is very difficult to instigate change, no matter how much they resist (125), or put it in other words freely paraphrasing from Spivak the subalterns can certainly speak, but can they be heard?
Overall, it can be said that the volume is characterised by an overt engagement in the problematic aspects of Bourdieu's social edifice such as the unequal interdependency between habitus and field, performative agency, the limits and potentials of his phenomenology of social space, and the issue of reflexivity. By bringing together critical perspectives developed by leading feminists, this volume certainly constitutes an important step towards a critical incorporation of Bourdieu's "explanatory power" (Skeggs, 21) to contemporary feminist thought and offers tangible avenues for the development of a combinatory approach between Bourdieu's sociology and feminist theories. As this volume illustrates, a critical engagement with his ontology of the social proposes generative ways of recasting the tension between structure and agency, and hence of overcoming the impasse between materialist and culturalist analyses.
On a more personal note, I would add that these feminist re-readings of Bourdieu's work may seem somewhat ironical, if not incongruous, to most second-wave feminists in France, where Bourdieu has generated considerable criticism by almost entirely ignoring their work and by offhandedly admonishing them for converting their social problems as a dominated group into a sociological problem. Even though from the social and historical standpoint of the feminist movement in France there is no other arena than the feminism where Bourdieu's otherwise groundbreaking work has been so controversial, [2] it is unquestionable that these long-overdue critical engagements with Bourdieu's work undertaken by feminist theorists are most refreshing and profitable to both contemporary social theory and feminist theorizing.
Despite the outstanding contributions of the volume, two criticisms should be noted. First, the lack of a concluding chapter is truly regrettable. Second, editorial failure to spot such errors as the misnaming of a leading French materialist feminist, Colette Guillaumin, ("Claudette Guillaumin", Lovell, 43) or typos such as "Bourdieurian" for Bourdieusian (250) is unfortunate. Nonetheless, Feminism after Bourdieu is an intelligent and thought-provoking volume. It is rich in theoretical explorations and empirical applications and will be valuable not only to Bourdieu scholars and feminist theorists, but also to academics and graduate students working in an array of other fields influenced by Bourdieu's work, such as culture and education, as well as those interested in the intersectional/transversal issues of social differentiation and stratification that crosscut across the "general social field" (6) and imply not only class but also gender, sexuality, "race" and ethnicity.
Sirma Bilge
Department of Sociology
Université de Montréal
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/feminismbourdieu.html
February 2006
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