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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Feminism after Bourdieu

Lisa Adkins and Beverly Skeggs (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 258 pages. $34.95. ISBN: 1405123958

Reviewed by Christina Smerick
Greenville College, christina.smerick@greenville.edu

Feminism after Bourdieu brings together a number of mostly British and Australian feminist scholars who are currently working on the intersections and conflicts between Bourdieu’s rather inflexible social theory and feminism’s inherent call for change. The scholars have independently published quite a bit of work on this topic, and it is certainly to the benefit of the reader that the varying approaches to this topic have been organized into a single volume. In short, Feminism after Bourdieu provides a variety of uses, reappropriations, criticisms, and expansions of Bourdieu’s social theory.

Given Bourdieu’s seemingly notorious failure to adequately address the role or place of gender within his overall theory, the editors of this volume spend some necessary time explaining exactly why feminist or post-feminist scholars of any persuasion should feel a need to (re)engage with Bourdieu’s work. The overall apologia is that, first, given post-feminism’s move away from "the sex/gender distinction as one of its key objects," a social theorist who does not place gender as central to his work is actually more helpful than one who organizes his corpus around it. Secondly, Bourdieu’s social theory is useful, albeit in a limited way, in that feminism (or, again, post-feminism—these terms are used interchangeably throughout the introductions) has moved away from an analysis of class and needs to return to class issues and social theory, rather than continuing to remain located in culture theory alone.

According to its editors, the book is organized according to three distinctions, making the task for the reader a bit easier: gender, sexuality and emotions, taste and culture. These three axes weave in and out of the three divisions under which the essays are organized. The first section of the book seems to be a loose grouping of a variety of approaches to the intersections between class and gender. One essay emphasizes Bourdieu’s analysis of class but fails to address gender, thus making it a complicated choice for a book entitled Feminism after Bourdieu. The other essays in the first section focus almost entirely upon gender issues and make relatively brief mentions of Bourdieu, usually in summative fashion. For example, Terry Lovell’s essay "Bourdieu, Class and Gender: ‘The Return of the Living Dead?’" provides a summary of various feminist thinkers and their approaches to capital and gender; she then finishes the essay by bringing Bourdieu’s understanding of capital to bear upon questions of culture, emotion, and class. She provides the traditional critique of Bourdieu regarding gender—namely, that he treats it as secondary, and thus it functions as doxic—but the primary thrust of the essay is an examination of feminist theory and its struggle with class. Reay, on the other hand, uses Bourdieu’s theory of capital as a model and constructs her own theory regarding emotional capital. It is a solid work, demonstrating the possibilities of using aspects of Bourdieu’s theory without embracing it wholeheartedly. Finally, Beverly Skeggs (also an editor of the volume) provides a critique of Bourdieu’s understanding of reflexivity, consciousness, and the utter exclusion of agents onto the field, due to class value differences. The essay demonstrates the adequacy of feminist critiques of Bourdieu by highlighting the limits of his theory to the possibility of change, despite his emphasis upon reflexivity as potentially transformative self-awareness.

The second section of the book, entitled "Symbolic Violence and the Cultural Field," is the strongest in terms of straightforward application of a Bourdieusian analysis or method to gender and class distinctions, particularly in the media. Here the book lives up to its title, as each scholar tackles the way classed women appear in British media. The first three essays—"Notes on ‘What Not To Wear’ and post-feminist symbolic violence," "Rules of Engagement: Habitus, Power, and Resistance," and "Habitus and Social Suffering: Culture, Addiction and the Syringe"—are particularly disturbing (especially for this American commentator, who is less well-versed in class distinctions due to the tenacity of most Americans in pretending such distinctions do not exist in our country), in that one is confronted by what is very obviously gendered/classed vitriol, which, nevertheless, passes muster with the community at large precisely because of the presence of the middle-class authoritative voice that reinforces class prejudice upon the bodies of the working-class women. Here, we witness the selective use of Bourdieu’s theories in order to analyze and reveal the embodiment of class/gender intersections in working-class and middle-class women, and the ways media reinforce the stereotypes of the social field. The last essay, "Mapping the Obituary," deals less sensationally, but intriguingly, with the changes to obituaries in the past hundred years in Great Britain. What is most impressive with this set of essays is the obvious benefit of a modified Bourdieusian analysis—while certainly not exhaustive or the last word, the use of habitus/field and the like to critically examine media, ad campaigns, and even obituaries proves to be a rich methodology.

The final section, "Retheorizing the Habitus," will be most satisfying to those readers, like myself, who struggle with Bourdieu’s rather pessimistic view regarding agency, yet who do not wish to abandon his theories completely. Lois McNay lets the conflict between Judith Butler and Bourdieu play out, and then provides a means of transcending or eliding both the cultural v. materialist divide in feminism, as well as the agency-as-linguistic v. agency-as-habitus divide. Lisa Adkins tackles the role of reflexivity in modern culture, challenging common assertions that individualism is on the rise and that subjects are able to reflect separately and objectively upon their gendered roles. This essay, too, brings up the fundamental question: How can/do things change, if both the field and the habitus are dominant in individual lives? Adkins relies heavily upon McNay’s work as a foil, thus reinforcing the moments in Bourdieu’s thought where change can take place (notably, in the lack of fit between gendered habitus and social field). (However, whether this shift in gender traditions is a product of reflexivity, or whether this reflexivity itself is a habitus, is the unquestioned assumption that Adkins raises here.)

Anne Witz’s essay is, in a word, delightful. She goes after Bourdieu with a highly humorous use of sarcasm, which nevertheless manages not to overwhelm the piece, mostly because her criticisms are spot-on—and she uses Bourdieu against himself. Witz manages to correctly label exactly what Bourdieu is doing, and thus demystifies his writings on masculinity by demonstrating that Bourdieu himself, while criticizing the unreflective assumptions of others, nevertheless makes the same mistake, and thus taints his own work. Finally, Elspeth Probyn provides a poetic, if at times confusing, account of the role of emotions and affect in Bourdieu’s theory. Drawing beautifully upon her own emotions of shame, she argues for a flexibility in sociology—a willingness to engage the body in theory without reducing the body to a "screen" or an unproblematic stable field. The essay works well as the conclusion of the book in that it tentatively charts a loosening of the dry binds of social theory and encourages thinkers to be unafraid of ambiguity.

One of the inevitable problems that emerge when creating a book out of a series of essays by various authors is that there is a certain amount of repetition in each of the texts. For instance, just about every scholar presents an encapsulated explanation of "habitus" and "social field," two central components of Bourdieu’s social theory. While it is certainly worth noting that scholars in general may explain these terms in very different ways, one finds, in these essays, remarkable agreement regarding their definition, if not their usage. Furthermore, since the various essays obviously address similar topics, one is left wishing one could witness a conversation between the scholars, in which their similarities and differences in thought could be brought forward and addressed directly. In other words, the book as a whole lives up to its title—it is certainly a book that demonstrates the various ways in which Bourdieu is approached and used by current British feminist scholars. One cannot help, however, but thirst for a work that engages the scholars more directly with each other, as well as a work that provides the main introduction to Bourdieu’s thought once, rather than many times.

However, this is a minor complaint about an otherwise solid example of postmodern feminist scholarship. What is most satisfying is the refusal of the scholars to accept Bourdieu’s theory as-is and then struggle to work within it. They demonstrate the possibility of critiquing and even rejecting a theory, yet nevertheless finding components of it useful for new thought. Both feminist scholars and sociologists should find the book helpful; feminists should take note of the generous and creative use of a problematic theory in generating new discourse; sociologists should take the examination of class habitus and gender formation to heart in their subsequent projects. Hopefully, the book can reinvigorate discussion about not only Bourdieu but other theorists who have been summarily dismissed due to failures in their theories to properly address sex and gender.

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