WORKING PAPER

READING MASCULINE DOMINATION:

A trajectory in Bourdieus life and beyond
Francesca De Luca
PhD Candidate Anthropology
University of Lisbon Social Science Institute

1. In the name of the father

It is recent news in Italy1, that the government has approved the draft of a bill that for the first time
authorizes families to call their children after the mothers last name. The draft has been submitted to
the Parliament in haste when, on the 7th of January 2014, the European Court of Human Rights,
solicited by an Italian family appeal (a legal fight lasting since 1999), condemned Italy for not
allowing them this possibility, thus not recognizing the equal status and rights between men and
women.
The new law will state that The child takes the fathers family name, or else, in case of agreement
between the parents resulting from declaration of birth, that of the mother or of both parents.
The governments manoeuvre has been transversally acclaimed as a success by many political figures,
mainly women, stating the long overdue update in the countrys status of civil rights that, up until
now, still reflected patriarchal values2.
A few critical voices have raised against the bill draft (apart from those, like the Lega Nord Party,
contrary to the law itself for being of secondary importance in the economy of the governments
agenda).
They underline how not only the text keeps the priority of the fathers family name as an automatic,
primary condition, but that even giving the possibility to be called after the mothers surname, it is at
the disposition of paternal approval that this is allowed, reiterating the condition of subordination of
women in the Italian Civil Code.

http://www.corriere.it/cronache/14_gennaio_07/italia-condannata-aver-negato-una-coppia-dare-proprio-figliocognome-madre-20e38ef4-7780-11e3-823d-1c8d3dcfa3d8.shtml
2
http://www.lastampa.it/2014/01/10/italia/politica/s-al-cognome-della-madre-se-c-accordo-tra-i-genitoridXy8heDzPy5Srlt1VlX1uN/pagina.html

No equality then between man and woman - comments cognomematerno.it, a website of citizens
engaged in the legal battle for free choice in family naming NOW it is the state that decides,
tomorrow will be the father3.
The correspondence between the father and the state, the continuation, interpenetration of one into
the other, of the agency of the first at the domestic level into the agency of the second at the public
level, is a central point in Bourdieus historical posture in one of his last works, Masculine
Domination (2001).
The authority of the father in the private sphere, within the family that has historically been one of
the three main agents, together with the educational system and the state, of reproduction and
perpetuation of the conditions of differentiations between the sexes echo, on the collective sphere,
what the author distinguishes as public patriarchy.
In La misrie du monde, published in 1993, Bourdieu had already argued that the states structure
lies on a polarization between a masculine, right hand with its financial institutions, the internal
affairs and police control, or the foreign affairs and the feminine, left hand whose agency is
relegated to secondary institutions that depends on the firsts, as education, health, welfare.
It was one of the problematic that he raised during his engagement in the anti-global debate, during
the course of the 1990s through the passage to the 21st century, when his critical stance at the public
level brought him great popularity.
Neo-liberal policies dismantle of the res publica for the sake of national economies and in favour of
privatization leads, in the authors vision, to the disruption of the feminine domain, not only through
the reduction of services that women benefit the most, but also by mining the labour market where
they have obtained some measures of power.
In Masculine Domination, though, Bourdieus analysis goes beyond this state polarization, focusing
on the structural conditions of subordination of women in the past as in contemporary societies, of
the less transparent ways with which its symbolic violence is perpetrated nowadays, even after
decades of feminist battles and apparent social and political gains.
In this particular recent event in Italian politics and legislation, it is revealing how the tentative to
regulate in the direction of formal equality (with a political correctness that empties, in my opinion,
the possibility to convey the deep, structural meanings behind social equality claims) disguise
inequalities that seem rather to operate on the level of consuetude.

http://www.cognomematerno.it/Default.aspx

The fathers veto on the nominating power, in fact, reverberate the act subject to nomos, domestic
and domesticated, performed at the behest of the man and conforming to the order of things []
(Bourdieu 2001:19).
The capacity to nominate belongs, in Bourdeusian terms, to the work of categorization that, in the
arena of the social space, encompasses the power to shape the legitimate way of perception.
Masculine domination lies on this mechanism of internalization of what, being legitimate, becomes
natural, unconfutable, doxa.
2. Bourdieu in action
In 2001, a few months before Pierre Bourdieus sudden death, French director Pierre Carles released
a documentary film La sociologie est un sport de combat with the aim to represent and catch
sociology in action, through the everyday practice of one eminent sociologist worldwide, Pierre
Bourdieu himself.
As it has been observed (Truc, 2004), by wanting to represent what sociology is to a wider audience
than just the academic one, the film ended up showing a specific, subjective mode of practicing it.
In the documentary, shoot in the last three years of Bourdieus life, we see a very busy man; nervous,
with a parched throat during a video-intervention at an American congress; resolute in responding to
the audience critics during a social assembly in Switzerland; an intellectual engaged both in academic
and social life, in studies as much as in politics.
The historical context is emblematic, with the raise of anti-globalization movements in response to
neo-liberal manoeuvres that go far over the borders of the national governments they stem from.
The cameras follow Bourdieu while giving lectures, being interviewed, working with the team of the
journal Raisons Dagir, participating in political demonstrations and social gatherings, or promoting,
at the time, his last book Masculine Domination.
These images are a precious document to situate his work on the androcentric symbolic domination,
and to understand the background on which it was conceived as a form of political action.
In this framework, it is of particular interest that while the gaze of the director seems to zero on
whatever occasion Bourdieu is engaged to talk about sociology and its political ramifications, the
sociologist himself is rather attentive and cautious in depicting such a connection and very aware of
the borders of his sociological (as opposed to personal) discourse.
In different excerpts of the film, he admonishes against the easy generalizations and arbitral uses that
can follow the urgency to draw political significance from a social analysis.

When invited to talk about sociology and inequality in a radio interview, at the question does social
inequality serve a purpose? he admits he cannot answer as a sociologist.
The problem of inequality placed this way, he states, is a metaphysical one and the instruments of the
sociologist do no accomplish this end. It is indeed a political question, which triggers his popular
parallelism between sociology and martial arts: these combat sports serve to defend oneself, and
cannot be used to give low blows.
Bourdieus work - he seems to be pointing up - is politically engaged through the specific means of
scientific social enquiry: its object is trying to understand how social phenomena work thus, how in
this specific topic social inequality is perpetuated.
While he refuses to make a personal, political statement of a problematic he is dealing with through
sociological analysis, he stresses the critical value of practicing social sciences, through uncovering
the mechanisms that allow structural inequalities to be reproduced.
Bourdieu opens this same radio interview with a definition of sociology rooted in his own experience
as a student and afterwards as a scholar. He reports that while transformation and social mutation
seems to be the leit motif of social sciences, both when he started as a self-taught sociologist and
ethnologist, that at present times, he was always struck by the inertia, the constants on which social
life is structured.
It is thanks to these constants that scientific inquiry is possible, that the researcher can establish
regularities in ways of being and define principles, so that social phenomena can be scientifically
understood. It is indeed in these terms of constants and reproduction that he can individuate the
permanence of unequal distribution of cultural capital, which he indicates as the principal mean of
contemporary social inequality.
The opposition between Bourdieus devotion to social reproduction versus historical transformation
is an old controversy that occupies both his supporters and his critics, as has been observed by Sherry
Ortner in an interesting review of the book Bourdieu and Historical Analysis.4
Ortner (2013) though, tries to go beyond the unfruitful contrast of the sociological vs historical
preoccupation, to reveal how Bourdieus passion, almost his obsession, is with the forces and
dynamics of social reproduction, not because he does not care about social change, but because he
cares about it very much. His is a theory of why, despite injustice, despite humiliation, despite
violence, and often despite sheer common sense, people cannot see what is holding them down.
Even though Bourdieus works as much as his words find their core in social reproduction, it is in his
particular take on history that he finds the escapade to conceive his work as critical analysis against
naturalization. He advocates for a historical sociology as a way to go beyond a dualism such as
4

Ortner, 2013, Online: http://aotcpress.com/articles/bourdieu-history/

structure and history, and his effort toward this complementary vision is at the base of his political
activism.
In different takes of the documentary, for example, he affirms to want to put his analysis on the
mechanisms of social inequalities to use, to become an instrument of cognition that can support social
and political change by giving political mobilization a punctual and compelling scientific
objectification.
In this sense, Masculine Domination occupies an important part in the Bourdieus journey as
sociologist in action, the core of a process that started years before, with his preoccupations of
peoples acceptances of the structural, ubiquitous, even institutionalized injustices of life.
3. Masculine Domination, a reading
If one were expecting to find in Bourdieus Masculine Domination one of those massive volumes
containing ground-breaking theory, new paradigmatic concepts or revealing leaks, she (or he) would
probably be left wanting.
The text is rather slim, with its three chapter contained in scarcely over 100 pages, the array is
constructed on Bourdieus well established grammar developed over decades of work and it amply
draws from previously produced data.
Actually, an article with the same title had already been published in 1990, while the differentiation
between the sexes was a topic that he had tackled through ethnological enquiry in The Logic of
Practice (French edition, Le Sens Pratique, published in 1980).
This synthetic, reduced aspect of the text, in contrast with the powerful resounding formula of his
title, has effectively been object of harsh critics.
A disconcerting brevity, for example, is the title of one of these critical reviews (Wallace 2003)
that embraces some feminist positions and arguments against the book.
In the article, the brevity of Bourdieus text on women subjugation is set against one of his previous,
mostly acclaimed work such as La Distinction (1979) - where he reads in terms of social class
aesthetic choices such as taste - with the wide quantity of sources sustaining the research and its
corresponding physical manifestation (i.e. its number of pages).
At its best argues Wallace - Bourdieu's work is a potent mix of scientific analysis and literary
interpretation, with each of these methods allowing him to reach those places where the other will not
take him [...]. By comparison with the thoroughness of his earlier work, Masculine Domination seems
a brisk treatment of a subject that does not have Bourdieu's full attention.

The critic goes on to pick on Bourdieus own choice of dealing with the theme drawing quite
exclusively from his old ethnologic data on one side and referring to Virginia Wolfs novel To the
Lighthouse on the other, while mostly ignoring important feminist positions on the matter.
I would like to suggest here a different reading though, aware of such critics as Wallaces but trying
to recover within the text and beyond it the reasons of its peculiar disconcerting brevity and
apparently reduced inner substance. Moreover, the quick discarding of this text after having
recognized Bourdieu as a normally rigorous author is quite unfruitful for the sake of a fair review.
Therefore, it is my point here to understand why Bourdieu wrote Masculine Domination, why he did
it in this apparently synthetic form and at a point of his life when he had been consecrated as one of
the most important intellectual figures worldwide and when he was deeply engaged in social actions
against neo-liberalism.
Rather than emerging as a new issue this work even its assertive tone - stands as something largely
overdue, as a project kept aside to have it ripen with time. The reasons for the further development
of such a problematic, the urgency of it, reveal themselves throughout the unfolding of the text and
point toward the scholars production as a whole.
The roots of this research, sown back in time, can be traced following Bourdieus trajectory across
his operate as academic and reflections on his experiences in life, transformed to sociological use
through what he calls participant objectification (2003).
To situate Masculine Domination in the larger apparatus of the authors work then, to give reason to
its finitude, I think that a few emblematic passages must be previously taken to surface. As turning
points around which Bourdieus reasoning disentangles, they seem to me as declarations of intents,
and represent those founding aspects that inform, as a priori, his work on this form of symbolic
power.
In synthesis they are: Bourdieus particular take on history, the concern with doxa and inequalities,
his peculiar vision and use of anthropological approach, and finally and overall, as an inevitable
continuous reference within and out the text, his own existence, his situatedness as a man.
It helps to start following Bourdieus own motivations that open, as a Socratic apology, the preface
to the English edition entitled Eternalizing the arbitrary.
This part features a clear response to the critics that Bourdieus position on the matter had previously
gathered (since its first appearance as an article in 1990 and since the French edition published in
1998).
The author addresses, in his own terms, that same opposition between reproduction and
transformation mentioned earlier, here taking the form of a debate of the permanence or change
between the sexes, that is obsessively raised by most [of his, n.d.r.] commentators.
6

Against the criticism of not accounting for the changes that have occurred in contemporary womens
status through decades of political and social battles, he asserts the inefficacy of isolated acts of
resistance (such as the parodic peformances of Judith Butler ) or the sole raising of consciousness as
instruments of social and political mobilization.
A thorough change of the inequalities between men and women can be achieved, in his opinion, only
with collective actions of resistance that lead to political reforms, starting from the structural renewal
of what is wrongly perceived as a natural difference.
He makes it a point to restore to historical action the relationship between the sexes, to clarify the
inherently historical character of the symbolic domination and to uncover the work of eternalization
and naturalization of sexual division.
Bourdieus active statement of a socio-analysis of domination is constructed through this appeal to
history as the instrument that enables objectification, which precedes mobilization.
Thus Bourdieus aim to reconstruct the history of historical labour of dehistoricization (p.82)
represents the basis of a political posture with regard to masculine domination while being at once
the founding reason of his scientific analysis of it.
Following the sociologist, the work of naturalization and eternalization of the sexual principles of
division must be individuated in the work of the institutions that produces it, ranging from the nuclear
family to collective ones as the church, the school, the state. For this reasons an action toward a
positive change in the status of women in society must be sought at the structural level of the social
arena where relations are woven and capitals economic, social, cultural are stirred.
Dismantling the processes responsible for the transformation of history into nature, which render
possible this extraordinarily ordinary social relation has another effect that is one of the
fundamental aspects in this analysis of Masculine Domination, that of restoring the paradoxical
character of doxa.
Doxa, from the Greek dokein, to expect, to seem, means literally common belief, popular opinion. In
its extended philosophical tradition from which Bourdieu draws it characterizes the experience by
which the natural and social appears as self-evident.5
I have always been astonished by what might be called the paradox of doxa the fact that the order
of the world as we find it [] is broadly respected; [] or, still more surprisingly, that the established
order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, privileges and injustices, ultimately
perpetuates itself so easily. (2001:1).

In Outline of a Theory of Practice, referred in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxa

From the opening bars of the prelude of the text, in fact, he sets masculine domination as a prime
example of paradoxical submission, at the very base of those (seemingly) inexplicable hidden rules
that set the limits of social mobility within the social space, that fixate what is thinkable and sayable:
The problematic of the ubiquitous androcentric order and of the symbolic violence perpetrated on
women is not only in line with the preoccupation toward the perpetuation of inequalities that
characterize Bourdieus opera as a whole, but in a sense lies because of its pervasiveness at the
very bottom of it all.
That is why Masculine Domination bears the strain of an overdue work, of a worry previously
detected yet not thoroughly explored.
The analysis is thus entrenched, from the very beginning, in these two, intertwined poles of history
and doxa - or, to put it differently - of naturalization and perpetuation.
As Ortner (2013) observes, most of Masculine Domination is taken up not [] with the social
organization of patriarchy as a system of power, but with the ways in which it perpetuates itself
through symbolic violence, that is, through womens deep psychological and somatic
internalization of their own inferiority.
Indeed, it is in the dynamics of the doxic experience that Bourdieu constructs the text, exploring the
modalities of acceptance of this symbolic violence that are at once structural and unconscious - as the
doxa itself.
The question of the historical ground where the reproduction of inequalities ceases to be perceived as
natural and reveals its arbitrariness, is a point on which Bourdieu insist with vehemence in his wide
theoretical system since his first writings.
Pivotal is his self-turning anthropologist during his staying in Algeria, along the emblematic years of
the countrys independence war (1958-1962) and the transformations actuated at the social level by
the emerging capitalism (Vasconcellos 2002).
In Carles 2002 documentary mentioned above, he talks about this experience as a cathartic moment
in his formation, where the capital of knowledge he gathered at the time could not be achieved
through academic manuals but only through learning how to posit the right questions, negotiating,
while doing research in a life-threatening situation.
This achievement had him getting older sooner, Bourdieu states.
What he brought back from those years in Algeria was also the determination to turn exotic what is
banal, to analyse, with the instrument of anthropological enquiry, those features among which the
familiar institution, relation between sexes, marital arrangements that he found homologous
between Kabylia and his region of origin, Bearn.

The triangulation built here between Kabylia/Bearn, history and doxa signs Bourdieus experience as
an anthropologist (Vasconcellos 2002), and in Masculine Domination this equilibrium is all the more
accentuated.
The use of his previous anthropological researches in this work, though, is purely instrumental, and
in line with the need to de-naturalize the subject through history, or, could be said, through historical
cases. Bourdieu proposes in fact to use ethnographic enquiry as a laboratory experiment, as an
instrument of socio-analysis of the androcentric unconscious that enables the anthropologist to
objectify the embodied structures of the masculine order in which he himself is entangled.
This is possible, he argues, because masculine domination, as doxa, operates at the level of categories
of understanding with which the world is constructed (he position himself critically in line with an
anthropological tradition that takes from Durkheims forms of classification).
What he is, basically, proposing is to use the anthropologists gaze on the other to unfold that
arbitrariness that can be, then, recovered in his own world.
The unravelling of the modalities with which sexual divisions come to be perceived as natural
develops, in the book, as a path that starts from his observation among the peasants of Kabylia, which
represent a paradigmatic form of the phallonarcisistic vision of the androcentric cosmology, to
extend to Mediterranean society and, in a more subdued and subtle way, to our contemporaneity.
Rather than make a comparative or evolutionist analysis as Wallaces critic to Bourdieus
ethnographic operation seems to imply the author of Masculine Domination deliberately attempts
to incorporate, as he calls it, an exercise of transcendental reflection.
Wallace laments (supporting his analysis with observation from Terry Lovell, which he himself labels
as one of Bourdieus most frequent and incisive critics) the lack of a systematic treatment of
Kabylias ethnographic sources and the unclear path through which they represent an earlier state
of Mediterranean culture.
I would argue, though, that Bourdieus discourse is clearly set in the socio-analytical experiment he
intends to operate, using disparate fonts and drawing from ethnographic observation6 as much as
literature, without giving an order of priority to one or the other. In the flowing of his analysis of
masculine order, he comes inside and out of the ethnographic field, to weave the problematic of
domination on a large mesh plot.
Bourdieu resorts to a suggestive passage of Virginia Wolfs Three Guinea to stress further the
affiliation of the arbitrary division of sexes (and the making of masculinity and femininity) with the
anthropological domain of its constituting mystical aspects:

In fact, Bourdieu makes continuous references to his book The Logic of Practice for a more articulated
anthropological analysis of the ethnographic data he is using

[] we look upon societies that sink the private brother [] and inflate in his stead a monstrous
male [] childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic
boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially; [] he goes through mystic
rites and enjoys dubious pleasures of power and domination while we, his women, are locked in
the private house without share in the many societies of which his society is composed. (2001:2)
Finally, another fundamental aspect of his choice of making use of his ethnographic experience
pertains to the need to deal with rigorous first-hand knowledge, rather than drawing from other
Mediterranean sources, as ancient Greek fonts, whose bias is of being interpretations of
interpretations, running the risk of treating as actual something that was already the product of
reconstruction. His years in Kabylia, more than any written knowledge, have given him that capital
of knowledge of the social world that is inherited only through experience.7
It seems that the fundamental feature that this direct experience holds for Bourdieu is not only the
knowledge (savoir) as accumulation, awareness of data, but the connaissance that is gathered through
existence, through being there.
At last, the closing aspect of this analyses in which I have tried to find the ramifications of Bourdieus
work into Masculine Domination is his own presence within its pages, articulated between his double
engagement, the scholar and the man.
On the one side, in fact, the book feeds from his ethnographic work in Kabylia and from the
elaboration of his experiences back in France; his considerations emerge, through the lens of the
scholar, with that analytical distance within the proximity of experience that he obtains through the
development of a research method that he calls of participant objectification.
This method gives him a mean to incorporate not the scholars self in the dimension of an
individualistic, auto-analytical turn (an indulgency he opposes to) but rather the objectification of the
social, structural conditions that render possible his stance as a scholar within the situation analysed
(Bourdieu 2003).
As Bourdieu clarifies, this analytical manoeuvre aims at objectivizing the subjective relation to the
object which, far from leading to a relativistic and more-or-less anti-scientic subjectivism, is one of
the conditions of genuine scientic objectivity (Bourdieu 2003: 282).
In this instance, delving into such a universe as masculine order and the domination it ensues appears
as the product of a double objectification (to stay in line with Bourdieus unique expressive style).
At first, we find the finalized, strategic use of ethnographic analysis aimed at objectifying the subject
of scientific objectification, a strategy designed to emancipate from categories of thought that are
7

Declared in an interview of Sociology is a Martial Art, 2002 documentary

10

already the product of that domination; in the meantime, occurs the objectification of the analysing
subject himself.
What appears from this last emerging operation is not only the scholar (as the reading of his 2003
Participant Objectification seems to focus on) but also the man, a product of the constructed
polarization between the sexes that embodies one side of that same opposition.
Being included he states from the start of Masculine Domination as a man or a woman, in the
object that we are trying to comprehend, we have embodied the historical structures of the masculine
order in the form of unconscious schemes of perception and appreciation. Bourdieus exercise of
gaining conscience through scientific objectification reveals, en fin, his preoccupation with bringing
forward his own situatedness, his habitus, as the matrix from which the whole analysis springs.
4. At the core of domination
Advancing in the analytical reading of Masculine Domination, we see how Bourdieu, from the very
beginning, establishes a sort of dialogical relationship between the ethnographic data of his Algerian
years and a wider, at times universalistic scenario of corresponding masculine order.
He dives in and out of the strictly ethnographic analysis, stretching those observations to find them,
transformed, in the dimension of vicissitudes, corresponding to what he indicates as the capital of
social knowledge he has gained from experiences.8
Following this logic, we find a paradigmatic system of structured oppositions that replay, in the form
of naturalized principles of differentiation, in our contemporary societies.
Among the Berbers of Kabylia, observes Bourdieu, the opposition male/female is not strictly
constituted as a sexual one, but goes beyond the sexual category (as we would intend it) to organize
the local anthropology and cosmology, absorbed in a system of oppositions where directions, body
parts, qualities are all inscribed in the male/female homologous division.
Top/bottom, right/left, dry/wet, hot/cold, male/female as much as movements and seasonal activities
(going up/down, opening/closing, sowing/harvesting) are perceived in relation to their sexual
correspondence, organizing the division of the connected activities (going to the market, remaining
home, looking up in the eyes, looking down on the floor).
Though this totalizing ordering of society through sexual division is paradigmatic among Kabyle
societies, the interlaced naturalization of the culturally constructed differences he continues and
the classification into (naturalized) opposition schemes by sexual appearance is a universally
observable feature.
8

See note 6 for reference

11

Where cosmology and ritual system support and reproduces that opposition in Kabylia, the
constitution and recognition of the natural division is performed by the legal system in
differentiated societies.
From the structural level down, the perceived-as-natural opposition between the sexes is objectified
in the social world, in the organization of things and, finally, in the habitus.
It is through the body that actions, perceptions, and dispositions are normalized as being feminine
and masculine. Indeed, the sexual division is, at its nuclear level, an embodied state, performed
through those bodies that are, at the same time, a product of it.
Where the analytical instrument of habitus permeates (since his 1963s Travail and Travailleurs en
Algrie onward) Bourdieus theoretical landscape, in Masculine Domination it is dipped in this
common denominator of the principle of sexual opposition (Vasconcellos 2003).
The gendered habitus, as structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures
collaborate to the universally applicable schemes of thought that arrange in the natural dimension
those same different features they contribute to produce (2001:8).
Unrelenting on this point of the naturalization of the differences through the habitus, Bourdieu
stresses how the doxic experience of naturalization of the sexes division is rooted in the observation
of those physical differences; a gazing that, being already an act imbued in the unconscious dynamics
of (andro-centered) categorization, constitute the observed differences as natural while in its stead
performing a structured classification.
This social principle of vision, then, find the justification to its sexual discrimination (literally
intended) in biological, anatomical differences.
Bourdieu reports several accounts from the history of science and medicine that record the
construction of the female body and its sexual organ through negative terms, or by principle of lack.
In contrast with manliness and virility, and with the symbolic power of the phallus, the female
counterpart is designed by emptiness and passivity. 9
The visible physical differences, while being socially constructed through an arbitrary, historical
gaze, find their natural justification through that same perceptive experience.
The social construction of the sexual organs states Bourdieu records and symbolically ratifies
certain indisputable natural properties. [] It helps to transmit the arbitrary of the social nomos into
a necessity of nature (physis) []. (p13)

In a more recent analysis, anthropologist Emily Martin observed, in a 1991 article entitled The egg and the sperm.
How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles how contemporary biomedical
scientific literature (and schools texts on reproduction) uses metaphors that diminish the role of female agency in
reproduction, marking the female reproductive process as less worthy than males through negative terms (such as
dying egg, debris, etc.).

12

The gendered habitus caught in its visual action seems to be the generative mean of the ratification
of masculine order.
The dominant matrix of that order is the default state, by which the feminine part is defined by
opposition, so that Bourdieu can affirm that the strength of the masculine order is seen in the fact
that it dispenses with justification (p.9).
This ratification of the masculine domination as neutral state is detectable, for example, in the Italian
law on family surname mentioned at the introduction, or, in its language (to remain within the political
dimension), in the definition of quote rosa (literally the pink quotes) that indicates the minimum
percentage of women to be included within a government or a Management Board as provided by
law. The official acts of formal equality, again, are expressed by sanctioning the sexes division and,
within it, the masculine domination.
It is possible, here, to see the continuation of those principles of the androcentric order that branches
out from the strictly paradigmatic ethnographic account reported by Bourdieu, to perpetuate, in more
subtle ways, in contemporary (Mediterranean) policies, in the social order, in the sexualized division
of space, in the organization of the state, in the division of labour.
5. Constructing essences
A central problematic advanced by Bourdieu as one of the knots around which Masculine Domination
disentangles, is to unravel the mechanism of naturalization of the social production of differentiation,
or, as he puts it, the inversion of the mechanism of cause and effect that determines the naturalized
perception of the division of the sexes.
The androcentric view builds the male and the female body, and this construction corresponds to the
values and principles of that view: it constitutes, for example, the phallus, the symbol of virility, the
specifically male point of honour, while making it seem as it is its objective biological existence to
determine it.
As in a closed circuit, the apparent natural foundation of the sexual division of the masculine order
lies on the interminable historical work of production of what is - again, arbitrarily - constitutive of
those bodies, creating as such their differentiated essences, as strength vs frailness, firmness vs
volubility, and organizing around these essences the whole sexual division of labour.
Bourdieu express this ambiguity as follows:
The particular strength of the masculine sociodicy comes from the fact that it combines and
condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological
nature that is itself a naturalized social construction. (p.23)
13

This operation of naturalization of the androcentric order on the body is not just representational, but
in constructing those different bodies, it actually shapes them, marking and structuring the way they
perform, perceive, and normalize their acts.
This somatization of the social relations of domination is the expression of the gendered habitus,
discriminated into the womanly and manly forms that reproduce the characteristics defying them.
The forces at work in shaping the essences of the two sexual expression are seldom explicit and rather
the resulting embodiments are the product of an automatic, agentless effect of a physical and social
order entirely organized in accordance with the androcentric order.
Thus, Bourdieu identifies different paths of the construction of the male and female type, which
correspond to the differentiating principles that inform the definition of those bodies, creating two
classes of habitus and giving space to distinct bodily hexis (in the sense of physical and postural
attributes).
At least in Kabylia, masculinity is constituted by denying the female part of the male, through a series
of what he labels rites of institutions that symbolically and physically distance the child from the
mother. This work aimed at virilisation not only shapes the boys habitus, but at the same time
confirms the sexualized space within which he is allowed to move, reflecting the cosmological level
of the differentiating rite.
The masculine apprenticeship forged in the name of honour, virtues and strength is not lost in more
familiar, unspoken traditions, and Bourdieu travels through memory to connect those same values in
his own experience of growing up in Barn, where he identifies the game of honour with the
expectations from men to be able provide, to take important decisions, to hold the monopoly of the
economy of symbolic goods.
By contrast, the construction of the female habitus is based on principles of containment, reduction,
a shrinking of the female presence that promotes a diminished identity.
If this principles are absolute when referring to Kabyle women, leading to a strict codification that
encompass many different aspects, from hair tying, clothing etiquette to the general submissive
bearing of their stance, this promotion of a contracted demeanour is extendable, in different forms, in
contemporary Western women.
Womens bodily hexis is continuously socially forged on a morality whose propriety parameters
are those of the demure, nice, smiling, motherly and embracing woman, or by contrast sensual, coy,
seductive yet still within a masculine dominant view that construct their image as the sexual object
of attraction.

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In the economy of symbolic goods, where the relations of exchange of symbolic capital take place
(as in marriage), these parameters represent the value to which women, as object of symbolic capital,
are measured.
Again, female habitus is the product of a tacit, unrelenting work of domestication within this
dominating order, which encourages the appropriate practices that pertain to their sex and defines its
virtues while at the same time fixing its negative or ambiguous aspects.
Bourdieu resorts in the text to the example of female intuition, a positively-laden feature that fixate
in the supposedly female essence a capacity to understand that he unrelentingly defines a particular
form of the special lucidity of the dominated. (p.31)
Another example to which he recurs in different contexts10 is the docility associated to female essence,
which translates in girls better results at school, at least in the form of behaviour and capacity to
comply to expectations. As he notes, docilitas etymologically prescribes who is pliable to the others
admonishment, ready to bent, lastly, acknowledger of power.
6. Females as contained
The contained and retracted stance of female habitus reflects two aspects on which it is interesting to
compare Bourdieus analysis to that of Iris Marion Young, a feminist philosopher whose
phenomenological work on female body experience encompasses similar positions while originating
from a different stance.
Again shifting from a Kabyle reference to a wider observable ground, Bourdieu reports how
femininity seems to be measured by a shrinking capacity that in Berber also corresponds to the
diminutive form that marks the feminine gender. Women, he argues, are enclosed in a restricted,
invisible space that limits their movements as much as their agencies. This symbolic confinement is
well represented by the use of the veil and the long vests that at the same time guarantee the respect
of morality. Broadening this observation, he reflects on womens posture and movement in general,
such as (averagely) sporting a shorter gait than men, bending and sitting with closed legs, bearing the
body in ways that reflect the moral constrains on which their habitus is constructed.
Womens movements are contained in a space that is as much physical as it is symbolical, a reflection
of the symbolic power that is at the base of its construction, that expects their restricted movement as
much as - in contrast favour mens conquering of space.
This domineering order that concurs to the forging of a female habitus signed by docility and
restriction, produces also a female experience of the body that is the limiting case of the universal
10

Reported in the radio interview already referred to from the 2002 documentary Sociology is a martial art

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experience of the body-for-others, constantly exposed to the objectification performed by the gaze
and discourse of others. (p.63)
As shown above, the body is socially determined by shared schemes of perception and production
that are the core of its habitus, and that precede and confirmed in every social interaction.
The body, though, is also the product of a self-perception that tends to reflect on itself the qualities
of those scheme and to gauge at others reactions.
Bourdieu defines the perceived body as socially doubly determined, being socially constructed both
in what seem its most natural aspects (bodily hexis), forged in its development by the social conditions
of production it undergoes, and also through those taxonomies that organize the social schemes of
perception and that are self-reflected by the subject.
These taxonomies, charged with judgments of quality, are not just limited to measuring physical
attributes, but tend to correspond them to the true nature of the subject, so the bodily hexis becomes
the locus of revelation of matching moral properties.
The power of the reactions it ensues argues Bourdieu - the symbolic power held by the gaze
(perceived as) bestowed on the body, depends on the positioning of the interactive agents in the social
space.
Masculine domination, which constitute women as symbolic objects whose being [] is a beingperceived [] has the effect of keeping them in a permanent state of bodily insecurity, or more
precisely, of symbolic dependence (p.66).
I will integrate Bourdieus analysis with a parallel reading of womens body experience, taken from
an essay that Iris Young wrote in 1980, by the title Throwing like a girl: A Phenomenology of Female
Body. Comportment, Motility and Spatiality.
Having Bourdieu been criticised for the offhanded way with which he has dismissed, as essentialists,
cornerstones of classic feminist theory as Kristeva and Irigay, this view switch is interesting, I would
argue, especially taking in consideration the philosophical phenomenological tradition from which
both authors theoretical apparatus draws, either strongly influenced by Merleau-Pontys
phenomenological work on perception (Vasconcellos 2003, Young 2005).
While, in Bourdieu, the phenomenologists influences can be trace in the notions of habitus and
bodily hexis, which then turn to the unfolding of the mechanisms of social reproduction, Youngs
work develops as a sort of phenomenological dialogue with Merleau-Ponty aimed at re-calibrating
the philosophers findings on the specificities of females embodiment.
The article Im here taking in consideration is triggered by Erwin Strauss brief neurophenomenological interpretation of the inefficacy of girls strategies when throwing a ball: they do
not make use of the lateral space, do not distribute the strength over the shoulder, do not, finally,
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optimize the action through their body and the space available, as boys do. The difference in girls
performance, manifested already at a young age depends, Strauss concludes, not from physiological
or biological characteristics, but from something inherently belonging to feminine essence.
Young opposes to such an explanation for rendering female experience and condition unintelligible,
confining it to a natural, ahistorical domain.
She opens her analysis drawing from Simone de Beauvoirs situationalism of every human
condition, not less the female person, whose condition is defined by her historical, social, cultural and
economic situation. To explain the commonalities observable in certain aspects of womens
experiences, Young states that even though there is no eternal feminine essence [] the situation of
women within a given sociohistorical set of circumstances [] has a unity [] specic to a particular
social formation during a particular epoch (2005:29).
She proceeds to circumscribe her analysis of feminine body comportment to contemporary advanced
industrial, urban, and commercial society, where women condition is signed by a sexist, patriarchal
culture. Differently from Bourdieu, Young does not delve much into the structural social conditions
that support the construction of the specifically feminine embodiment, being more preoccupied on
unravelling the phenomenological ground of that experience, so this is where her grasp on female
condition follows different avenues, which can be absorbed in Bourdieu broader analysis.
Young distances herself from Beauvoirs interpretation of females restrained embodiment as derived
(quite exclusively) by living their body as a burden due, for the existentialist philosopher, mainly
to those hormonal and physiological changes, experienced as mysterious, that sign their life from
puberty and that tie women to nature, to immanence, at the expenses of their subjectivity.
Against such an essentialist interpretation, that seems to substitute the feminine essence with rooting
womens subdued condition to its physiological determination, she proposes a reading of the
contained female comportment that take into account the situatedness of human condition in its
specific feminine existence.
With this last expression, she indicates a set of structures and conditions that delimit the typical
situation of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which this situation
is lived by the women themselves (p.30).
Young seeks to fill a gap present both in phenomenological existentialism and in feminists theory,
through describing those kind of movements in which the body aims to accomplish a definite purpose
or task, creating a direct comparison with Merleau-Pontys work.
The question she tries to find answers to is why women move differently for men, to what this
gendered mobility is due; a question to which Bourdieus analysis answers, as shown above, with

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their symbolic dependence deriving by their objectification operated by the (embodied) masculine
gaze.
Young takes her cue from Beauvoirs interpretation of womens life in patriarchal societies
experienced through a tension between immanence and transcendence.
As humans, women are exposed to all those traits grant to the transcendental subjectivity constructed
in these societies. Though, continues Young, being socially constituted as other, as correlate of men,
as objects a constitution that Bourdieu roots in the economy of symbolic good - females also
perceive themselves in immanence, seeing culturally and socially denied the subjectivity, autonomy,
and creativity that are denitive of being human and that in patriarchal society are accorded the man
(p.32). This structural tension lies at the base of feminine embodiment and body movement, with
female agents failing to make full use of their bodies and spatial possibilities.
Synthetizing Youngs line of reasoning, feminine mobility can be outlined in three contradictory
modalities.
First, as anticipated, she identifies an ambiguous transcendence, overlaid with immanence, so that
only a part of the body moves out toward a task, while the rest remains rooted in immanence.
Secondly, she recognizes a feminine inhibited intentionality, that - unlike Merleau-Pontys
conception of body motility as rooted in an intentionality expressed through an I can is guided by
a sense of I cannot.
Lastly, again in discordance to Merleau-Pontys deductions that the body projects an aim toward
which it moves, bringing unity to and uniting itself with its surrounding, feminine bodily existence,
due to its inhibited intentionality, stands in discontinuous unity with both itself and its surroundings.
What derives from this containment of intentionality and mobility is a hesitant engagement with
things, with movements, an uncertainty that is the product of this continuous self-reflection projected
on the task at hand, because women live their bodies as objects while living in them. Moreover, and
here theres another intersection with Bourdieus discourse that brings new cues on female
embodiment, the spatiality in which they move is perceived and sought after, as an enclosed,
restricted space.
Young argues that, if on the one hand this self-constructed spatial limitation is a reflection of the
objectifying gaze that makes them experience themselves as positioned in space (rather than having
the phenomenological space spring from their moving bodies, as in Merleau-Pontys
phenomenology) on the other hand the spatial containment serves as a sort of safe-zone in which they
secure their physical indemnity from outer threats.
This last point in particular seems to open a breach between Youngs analysis and Bourdieus
position. Where the first seeks and individuates occurrences where women have an active engagement
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with their restricted behaviour (such as self-defence), the second inevitably reads this instances as
reproducing those same perceptive schemes ingrained in masculine domination, that are the
consequence of its pervasive symbolic violence.
This subtle form of violence, in fact, operates at the level of the habitus and below the level of the
decision of consciousness, the product of the immense preliminary labour that is needed to bring
about a durable transformation of bodies and to produce the permanent dispositions that it triggers
and awaken (Bourdieu 2001:38).
This is also why, to Bourdieu, womens acts of cognition toward the masculine order as is the
indulgent female gaze on masculines effort to rise to his expected manhood - are practically act of
recognition.
7. Conclusions
Bourdieu argues that the habitus results from a coincidence of objective structures and cognitive
structures, causing, as doxa, expectations that are continuously confirmed through the course of the
world. Thus, women sticking to the transcript expected of them is the product of the psychosomatic
work elaborated by the relation of domination in which they are absorbed.
It is important here to underline how for Bourdieu the body and its movements, as the social space,
are neither completely determined in their significance, nor completely undetermined.
The indeterminacy leaves space to forms of resistance, that struggle zone that, as he observes for
example among women in Kabylia, leads to a counter-representation of the genital organs producing,
within the same symbolic universe, an antagonistic interpretation that define the male sex as hanging
limply, without vigour; or again, indeterminacy led feminists decades of fights to conquest a
measure of power within the social space.
These hidden transcripts ignited by indignation, to use James Scotts metaphor, have not the
capacity to revert the unbalanced position between the dominant and the subordinate. The frontier
between the hidden and public transcript is a struggle zone where at stake is the power to defying and
constitute.
The doxic power of sexual structures though, argues Bourdieu, lies in their astonishing autonomy
in relation to economic structures, so that the same system of classificatory schemes is found, in its
essential features, through the centuries and across economic and social differences []. (2001:81)
Even in observable, contemporary changes in womens condition, mainly in the labour market or the
social welfare, the gaining have been obtained in concomitance with a de-valorisation of those fields
(such as the deregulation and privatization).
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Though advocating an active, political engagement against the modalities of symbolic violence, in
his social deterministic analysis of the doxic experience Bourdieu does not leave much space to the
possibility of a resistance able to subvert the historical action of reproduction of masculine
domination.
That is probably why, at last, he turns to the mysterious grip of love to find the possibility, even if
only in the private alcove, of a release of mens grip on the domineering role and a reversal in the
relation of domination.

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