Gender and Power in Bourdieu's Writings

Feminist Theory
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Masculine domination: gender and power in Bourdieu's writings

Veronique Mottier
Feminist Theory 2002; 3; 345
DOI: 10.1177/146470002762492042
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345
Masculine domination
Gender and power in Bourdieu’s writings FT
Feminist Theory
Copyright © 2002
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 3(3): 345–359.
[1464-7001
(200212) 3:3;
Véronique Mottier Jesus College, Cambridge University 345–359; 029168]
Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. 144 pp. ISBN
0-7456-2264-X, £50.00 (hbk); ISBN 0745-6226-58, £14.99 (pbk)
Introduction
At the time of his death on 23 January 2002, Pierre Bourdieu’s reputation
as one of the most important social theorists of our time was uncontested
within the Anglo-Saxon context. His position in France, however, was
more controversial. Attacks on his work have increased in recent years, a
number of which have been exceptionally violent, even by French
academic standards. It is noteworthy that these have come not only from
his usual intellectual opponents, such as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut,
whose well-known La pensée 68 (1988) notoriously described Bourdieu’s
work as an ‘upmarket version of vulgar Marxism’, or Raymond Boudon’s
more elegant methodological individualism offensive, but also from his
(former) friends and closest collaborators. To name but a few in the latter
category, Jeannine Verdès-Leroux published a volume on Bourdieu called
Le savant et la politique (The Scientist and Politics) (1998). Its subtitle,
‘Essay on the Sociological Terrorism of Pierre Bourdieu’, reflects the tone
of the book which dismisses Bourdieu’s ‘pessimistic Leninism embellished
with a heavy scientific apparatus’ (1998: 71) without, however, offering
much in-depth analysis. In Le Monde, Régis Debray expressed his
disappointment at the ‘banality’ of Bourdieu’s writings on television
(Bourdieu, 1998b) which, he argued, ‘present personal obsessions as objec-
tive observations’ (Debray, 1997), whereas Luc Boltanski (2002) noted
disapprovingly Bourdieu’s ‘kind of agit-prop activism of the past few years,
with a group of dogmatic followers . . . who functioned like a political cult’.
Finally, Bourdieu himself regularly complained in later years about the
perceived hostility of the popular intellectual magazine Le Nouvel Obser-
vateur and the influential academic journal Esprit towards him.
My aim in this article is not, however, to assess Bourdieu’s intellectual
legacy as a whole. Instead, I will explore more specifically his contributions
to the theorization of gender. Although Bourdieu’s work has been far less

346 Feminist Theory 3(3)
influential in this area than that of his main intellectual ‘competitor’ Michel
Foucault, his theoretical framework has nevertheless been a source of
inspiration to a number of feminist authors. Until recently, this was despite
Bourdieu’s own relative neglect of the category of gender. Against this
backdrop, the publication of La domination masculine (1998c) was an
important event. It could be expected that this book, which explicitly sets
out to analyse the gendered nature of symbolic violence and thereby builds
on an earlier article also called ‘La domination masculine’ (Bourdieu,
1990b), would compensate for the lack of attention Bourdieu pays to gender
in the rest of his oeuvre. Its recent publication (2001) in a competent, if not
overly elegant, English translation by Richard Nice has also made Bourdieu’s
final thoughts on gender available to the English-language public.
It would be a mistake to read Masculine Domination in isolation from
the rest of Bourdieu’s work. His writings cover numerous widely diverging
themes including ethnographies of Berber highland peasants in Kabylia
(Algeria), analyses of the education system, Heidegger, the world of
academics, television, poverty, taste and language. But, as Wacquant (1993)
points out, English-language reception of his writings has been marred by
fragmented readings of these works (partly due to initially slow transla-
tions), which has led to a number of misunderstandings. To avoid such
misinterpretation, it is important to recognize that Bourdieu’s various
writings are all part of a unifying central project: the analysis of power and
domination and their social reproduction in modern societies. Bourdieu’s
analysis of masculine domination is anchored in his theory of action,
which needs to be located in this specific intellectual context and which
also has political implications. Any assessment of Bourdieu’s ideas on
gender needs to take into consideration both their place in his general
theoretical framework (all the more so since that framework is mostly left
implicit in Masculine Domination) and the specific intellectual and
political background against which they have been formulated.
The article aims to: first, situate Bourdieu’s project in its intellectual and
political context and outline its central aims; second, briefly introduce the
key elements of Bourdieu’s general theory of action and discuss the place
of gender within this framework; third, critically and more specifically
explore Bourdieu’s writings on gender, concentrating particularly on
Masculine Domination, but referring also to his earlier work; and, fourth,
conclude by raising a number of additional questions and criticisms regard-
ing his analyses of gender.
The politics of social theory

Bourdieu’s work as a whole constitutes an important contribution to the
theory of action. Agency has been revalued within social theory over the
past three decades through the so-called interpretative turn in social
science. This revaluation has been largely confined to Anglo-American
social science. In this context, the theory of action emerged initially as a
methodological rather than a political concern. This is not to say that the
political relevancy of issues around action, meaning and subjectivity was

Mottier: Masculine domination 347
unrecognized. As Giddens, for example, noted: ‘to regard social agents as

“knowledgeable” and “capable” is not just a matter of the analysis of action;
it is also an implicitly political stance’ (Giddens, 1982: 16). Nevertheless,
discussions around agency and subjectivity (including those offered in
Giddens’s own work until the late 1980s) were rarely concerned with
drawing out these political implications.
This has changed over the past decade. Feminist theorists, in particular,
have been instrumental in politicizing issues of identity and subjectivity,
as has the growing literature around ethnic, racial and sexual identities.
Such writings emphasize the necessity of connecting individual practices
of self-formation with institutional and political structuration. The authors
associated with the reflexive modernization thesis, particularly Giddens (in
his later work), Beck and Lash, have similarly contributed to the framing
of subjectivity in political rather than purely methodological terms.
Among the different strands of social theory concerned with drawing out
some of the political implications of the revaluation of subjectivity,
profound theoretical disagreements exist. There is nonetheless a shared
recognition of the necessity of connecting subjectivity and power firmly
with issues of the body and sexuality. Indeed, our relation to ourselves as
sexual beings is a central feature of modern identity. As a major point of
connection between individual identity, the body and social relations of
power (including gender relations), sexuality needs to be taken into
account in any rethink of the formation of subjectivity. These diverse
strands of literature signal a shift for Anglo-American social theory away
from largely methodological issues towards more political concerns. If the
late 1970s signalled an interpretative turn in the theorizing of action, the
past years have seen a political turn within Anglo-American social science
(see Mottier, 1999).
The intellectual context of debates around theories of action has been
quite different in postwar French social theory. Although French social
theorists have similarly emphasized the problems of action, meaning and
subjectivity, their concerns were, from the start, accompanied by political
overtones. The numerous controversies around these issues were explicitly
connected with the political battles of the time and especially with attacks
on humanism and Marxism. The acrimonious controversies around subjec-
tivity and agency that emerged, particularly during the late 1960s, split
French intellectual life. Lévi-Strauss, Foucault in his early writings, Barthes,
Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan and others attacked the centrality of the subject
from a broadly structuralist or psychoanalytical perspective. Their oppon-
ents in the debate included most of the philosophical establishment of the
time, which came to the rescue of subjectivity and agency from a Marxist,
phenomenological or hermeneutic perspective. The works of Bourdieu
served as important conceptual breaks within this theoretical context. His
framework for rethinking subjectivity and political agency in late modernity
explored ways to go beyond the dichotomies of subjectivism/objectivism or
agency/structure which dominated French postwar social theory.
More recently, there has been a certain convergence within Anglo-
American and French social theory concerning the political dimensions of

the theory of action. The conceptual field within which action is now prob-
lematized has shifted from meaning to power, political agency (resistance)
and truth, and from problems around interpretation and explanation to
issues of the body, gender and sexuality. The growing influence of French
writings, especially Bourdieu’s, within Anglo-Saxon social theory adds to
the non-geographical nature of the current refiguration of theories of action,
subjectivity and power. The main features of Bourdieu’s rethinking of the
links between power and agency will be discussed in the next section.
Bourdieu’s theory of practice

Bourdieu’s theorization of action, subjectivity and meaning focused on the
relation to language and power and was initially strongly influenced by
structuralist views on language. Merleau-Ponty had been the first to point
out the implications of Saussure’s linguistic theory for a philosophy of
action and of the subject in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France
on 15 January 1953. Following Merleau-Ponty’s direction, Bourdieu, in his
early work, set out to develop a ‘general theory of culture’ from a Saus-
surian perspective. But, on the basis of a critique of the Saussurian oppo-
sition between langue (language) and parole (speech), he reorientated his
project towards a theory of cultural practice instead, and shifted the Saus-
surian concern with langue to that of parole – actual speech. Combining
Saussure’s structuralist approach with a shared interest in Wittgenstein’s
ordinary language philosophy and Austin’s speech act theory, Bourdieu
turned away from a concern with meaning to an emphasis on the social use
of language. In Language and Symbolic Power (1991), which of all his
writings most explicitly focuses on language, Bourdieu stressed the
embeddedness of performative speech acts within wider relations of power.
From this angle, Language and Symbolic Power explores the ways in which
relations of communication are also relations of symbolic power, wherein
relations of force are being actualized.
Bourdieu thus moved away from the phenomenological emphasis on the
meaning-giving subject to a concern with the social conditions and
constraints, and especially the power relations, within which meaningful
practices and discourses take place. However, while his work therefore
constitutes conceptual breaks with regard to subjectivist understandings of
action, meaning and subjectivity, his alternative frameworks also attempt
to move beyond objectivist approaches.
Objectivist theories of action, such as structuralism, were rejected by
Bourdieu for reducing social action to ‘simple epiphenomenal manifes-
tations of power’ and for reducing agents to the simple bearers of structure
(Bourdieu, 1980: 70). The central aim of Bourdieu’s work was undoubtedly
to construct a theory of practice that avoids both the objectivist ‘fetishism
of social laws’ (1980: 70) and the subjectivist neglect of the structural
constraints on action. His alternative framework, which takes into account
the constituting as well as the constituted dimensions of practice, is
outlined most clearly in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and The
Logic of Practice (1990a). Bourdieu builds his theory of practice on the

central concepts of habitus, fields and capital. The notion of habitus refers
to dispositions, which result from social conditioning related to one’s
position within social space. Habitus is generative of distinctive social
practices, which are at the same time also classificatory schemas as
described in Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (1998a). They
generate thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions with a freedom
that is limited by the historical and social conditions of their production
(Bourdieu, 1980: 92). Habitus is thus an enduring system of dispositions,
‘structured structures’ as well as ‘structuring structures’ (1980: 88). Habitus
emphasizes individuals’ capacity for structured improvisation deriving
from the system of dispositions which are both objective and subjective
(see also Postone et al., 1993: 4).
The notion of habitus implies a break with the phenomenological focus
on the motivation of action through intentions (Bourdieu, 1994: 183). For
Bourdieu, action is motivated not by individual intentions, but by struc-
turally grounded strategies of maximization of material and symbolic
profits. His work conceptualizes action as praxis, stressing the connections
between action, the realization of interests and relations of domination. An
important contribution of Bourdieu’s work in this respect is to stress not
only the material foundations of social and cultural power, but also their
symbolic dimension (see Bourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970).
Many of his writings thus explore the articulations between economic
capital and symbolic capital. This latter notion is at times incorrectly
equated with social and cultural capital (see, for example, Postone et al.,
1993: 5). Using the concept of symbolic capital, Bourdieu focuses more
specifically on the many ways in which the arbitrariness of the possession
of economic, cultural and social capital often remains misrecognized as a
result of the systems of classification inherent in the habitus (see Bourdieu,
1982: 36; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 119). In other words, symbolic
capital is the form that economic, cultural and social capital take when
these elements are perceived as legitimate.
The notions of habitus and capital are intertwined with that of fields.
Bourdieu interprets modern society not as a homogeneous totality, but in
terms of a number of differentiated semi-autonomous fields such as the
religious field, the academic field, the bureaucratic field, the field of
education or the field of cultural production. Fields possess their own regu-
lative principles and constitute a space in which struggles over different
types of capital – economic, social, cultural and symbolic – take place. The
interplay between agents’ habitus and their relation to different forms of
capital determines their location within respective fields. Following
Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu argues that the dispositions of the habitus are
incarnated in concrete bodies, which are situated in time as well as within
specific social fields. At the same time, however, the concept of habitus
itself claims to capture a universal structure of being.
Bourdieu’s pivotal concepts of habitus, fields and symbolic capital
suggest that subjects are neither free agents nor determined ‘automatons’.
According to Bourdieu, symbolic domination implies a certain degree of
complicity on the part of the agents that are subjected to it (Bourdieu,

1982: 36). He thus develops a subtle reconceptualization of the connections

between structure and agency, which seems particularly appropriate for the
analysis of late modern social life in which symbolic practices appear
increasingly central. As Lash (1993: 210) puts it, Bourdieu’s theory of
practice has become more prominent since the late 1980s ‘because the real
world has changed to a point at which it has come to agree with Bourdieu’s
world’.
Bourdieu’s theoretical project of overcoming the structure/agency,
subjectivism/objectivism dichotomies constitutes an important site of
conceptual innovation within the field of social theory. His praxeological
perspective offers a sophisticated reconfiguration of the theory of action.
This conceptual framework provides useful tools for feminist theory,
particularly his key ideas on the symbolic aspects of power, the dialectics
between agency and the complicity of agents with their own domination,
and the embodiment of agents. However, the place of gender within
Bourdieu’s own framework remained undertheorized until he explicitly
tackled the issue in Masculine Domination. Certainly, the central weakness
of Bourdieu’s oeuvre from the point of view of feminist theory has been his
neglect of the gendered nature of subjectivity and his ‘failure to consider
sufficiently the gendered habitus’, as McNay (2000: 32) alleges. Authors
such as Krais (1993), McCall (1992), McNay (1999, 2000) and Moi (1991)
have consequently undertaken to integrate Bourdieu’s key concepts
such as habitus, fields and symbolic power within gender analysis. In the
next section, I will explore Bourdieu’s own attempt to do so in Masculine
Domination.
Gender and domination

While Bourdieu admittedly paid insufficient attention to gender in his
earlier writings, this is not to say that gender was altogether absent from
his work. In particular, a substantive part of his Outline of a Theory of
Practice (1977) was dedicated to an ethnological analysis of Kabyle society.
It demonstrated how the strict division of labour between men and women
in that society structured a sexually differentiated vision of the world – a
theme that he returned to in The Logic of Practice (1990a). Scattered
passages on gender can also be found in Distinction (1984) and The State
Nobility (1996). Bourdieu himself is at pains to establish that gender has
been a concern throughout his oeuvre, presenting Masculine Domination
as the ‘opportunity to clarify, support and correct my previous arguments
on the same subject’ (2001: vii) and pointing out somewhat defensively
that the logic of his entire oeuvre suggests the importance of this topic,
since women and homosexuals are the main victims of symbolic violence
(2001: ix).
Both in his earlier writings and in Masculine Domination, Bourdieu
conceptualizes gender primarily in terms of sexual difference. In my view,
this is the most problematic aspect of his gender analysis and it is therefore
important to examine this issue before moving on to consider the book in

more detail. The analytical distinction between sex and gender has been the
subject of much debate within feminist theory. Although theorists such as
Juliet Mitchell have contested this distinction, the concept of gender (under-
stood as the social meanings around ‘natural’ sex differences) has been
crucial in unpacking the socially constructed nature of masculinity and
femininity (see Oakley, 1997). It allows us to analyse how men become men
and women become women. However, as Oakley points out, ‘to speak of
women and men as “engendered” implies difference, rather than power
inequality’ (1997: 30). Inequalities of power can neither be reduced to nor
explained by gender differences alone. Any convincing theorization of the
gender order will need to combine the analysis of gender difference with an
analysis of gender power. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of gender as sexual
differentiation – in his own words, as ‘sexually characterised habitus’
(Bourdieu, 2001: 3) – reproduces this conceptual weakness and keeps the
focus of his analysis on the construction of sexual differentiations without
managing to integrate this with a convincing account of gender power. This
is not to suggest that Bourdieu has nothing to say about power in Masculine
Domination; indeed, the book’s major aim is to integrate the analysis of
gender with the study of power inequalities between the genders. And, as
we shall see, his account of symbolic violence and misrecognition provides
useful conceptual tools for understanding aspects of these power relations.
However, as a result of the primary conceptual focus on differentiation
rather than power, Masculine Domination ultimately fails to fully achieve
its initial objective.
The analysis in Masculine Domination is based on two premises that are
both equally problematic. First, Bourdieu assumes that:
the understanding of the objective structures and cognitive structures of a particu-

larly well-preserved androcentric society (such as Kabyle society, as I observed in
the early 1960s) provides instruments enabling one to understand some of the best
concealed aspects of what those relations are in the economically most advanced
societies. (2001: vii)
In other words, the gender division in Kabyle society serves as an ideal type
(see also Krais, 1993: 159), providing insight into the gender order in late-
modern (western) society. Focusing on a culturally ‘different’ society also
serves as an indirect way of reflecting back on our own social arrangements
and thereby denaturalizing them. Consequently, much of Bourdieu’s
argument, especially in the first part of Masculine Domination, is anchored
in his account of Kabyle society (although he also refers to other people’s
research on gender inequality as well as to literature in order to illustrate
his argument, providing extensive comments on Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse, for example). Bourdieu’s analytical strategy is problematic,
however, in that the focus on premodern Kabylia implicitly assumes that
there is only one path from premodern to modern society and that it
conceptualizes the (modern) gender order as homogeneous (an issue that I
will return to in my concluding remarks).
Second, Bourdieu asserts rather than demonstrates that:

while the domestic unit is one of the sites where masculine domination manifests
itself most indisputably and most visibly . . . the principle of the perpetuation of
the material and symbolic power relations exerted there is largely situated outside
that unit, in agencies such as the church, the educational system or the state.
(2001: 116, see also 4)
It is this premise that will be the most contentious for many feminist
thinkers. The idea that ‘the personal is political’, which suggests that many
women’s life experiences are in fact rooted in the subordinated position
they occupy as a group within the gendered power structure, has been at
the heart of second-wave feminism. It is within the context of this politi-
cization of the personal that the boundaries between the ‘private’ (includ-
ing the sphere of the family and sexuality) and the ‘public’ have been
intensively questioned and theorized in feminist debates. Given the
centrality of this claim to Bourdieu’s analysis of the gender order, it is there-
fore disappointing that Masculine Domination does not provide much in
the way of convincing arguments as to why the domestic sphere should be
seen as less relevant for the analysis of gender inequality.
Masculine Domination is organized around three central themes: the
naturalization of masculine domination; the misrecognition of this domi-
nation; and the mechanisms of social reproduction of this domination.
Chapters 1 and 2 of the book examine the ways in which bodies, sexu-
alities and male and female identities are socially constructed rather than
‘natural givens’. More importantly, Bourdieu examines how the legit-
imization of domination operates through its naturalization: ‘The particu-
lar strength of the masculine sociodicy’, Bourdieu argues, ‘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 naturalised social construction’ (2001: 23; original emphasis). In an
explicit rejection of Butler’s emphasis on naming in Gender Trouble (1990)
(although ignoring her later turn towards the materiality of the body in
Bodies that Matter [1993]), he adds that:
the work of symbolic construction is far more than a strictly performative operation
of naming which orients and structures representations, starting with represen-
tations of the body . . . it is brought about and culminates in a profound and durable
transformation of bodies (and minds). (Bourdieu, 2001: 23, see also viii)
As a result of symbolic violence, Bourdieu argues, women tend to misrec-

ognize their domination; indeed, sexually differentiated dispositions
(habitus) ‘lead the dominated to take the point of view of the dominant on
the dominant and on themselves’ (2001: 42). Bourdieu thus raises the
important but contentious issue of women’s complicity with male domi-
nation. As he writes:
Masculine domination finds one of its strongest supports in the misrecognition
which results from the application to the dominant of categories engendered in
the very relationship of domination, and which can lead to that extreme form of
amor fati, love of the dominant and of his domination, a libido dominantis (desire
for the dominant) which implies renunciation of personal exercise of libido domi-
nandi (the desire to dominate). (2001: 80; original emphases)

The third and last chapter of the book raises the question of permanence
and change in the gender order. This section is, in my view, the weakest
part of the book. It seems hastily written and its arguments remain under-
developed. Bourdieu identifies the main agents of the social reproduction
of the gender order as the family (though minimizing its role elsewhere),
the church, the educational system and the state, but dedicates no more
than a few paragraphs to the role of each of these despite their central
importance (2001: 85). He goes on (again, rather superficially) to outline a
few major recent changes in gender relations, such as the emergence of new
types of families and the public proliferation of alternative models of sexu-
ality, which question the permanence of the gendered habitus, based as it
is on the model of hegemonic heterosexuality. Bourdieu also notes the
increase in the number of working women, ‘which no doubt has conse-
quences for the acquisition of the sexually differentiated dispositions
within the family’, and the increased access of girls to higher education and
changes in the structures of production, which, he argues, ‘has led to a very
important modification of the position of women in the division of labour’
(2001: 90). Whereas Bourdieu thus opens up his framework to the role of
social change and the effects of feminist mobilization (as well as other
factors), he immediately closes this door again in the next passage. He mini-
mizes the impact of such recent changes on the gender order by stressing
that ‘the old structures of the sexual division seem still to determine the
very direction and form of these changes’ (2001: 94). Through the inter-
nalization of gendered schemes and perceptions, he argues, girls tend not
to choose the life options that have recently become available to them. This
leads him to conclude that the
constancy of the habitus that results from this is thus one of the most important
factors in the relative constancy of the structure of the sexual division of labour:
because these principles are, in their essentials, transmitted from body to body,
below the level of consciousness and discourse, to a large extent they are beyond
the grip of conscious control and therefore not amenable to transformations or
corrections. (2001: 95)
The reproduction of the habitus combined with the relative autonomy of

the economy of symbolic goods (including the institution of marriage) lead
Bourdieu to argue that masculine domination perpetuates itself within the
latter ‘unaffected by the transformations of the economic modes of produc-
tion’ (2001: 95), propped up by the family, the church and the law. Ironi-
cally, while this last chapter is called ‘Permanence and Change’, it in fact
develops a rather pessimistic account which heavily overemphasizes
permanence over change in the gender order.
Masculine Domination thus reproduces a flaw that has often been noted
with respect to Bourdieu’s general theoretical framework. As numerous
authors have pointed out, Bourdieu’s analysis of the production and repro-
duction of social life lacks a convincing account of social change. Whereas
he recognizes the temporal structure of practice, thereby emphasizing the
processual nature of the reproduction of structures, it is not clear how
structures are also newly produced (Reckwitz, 1997: 91) or transformed

(Calhoun, 1993: 72 ). As Lash (1993: 203) puts it, Bourdieu’s theoretical

emphasis on the primacy of reproduction ‘inhibits the possibility of any
strong theory of social change’. In short, there is too much structure and
not enough agency in Bourdieu’s theory of practice in general. In Mascu-
line Domination, the very possibility of change in the gender order is mini-
mized by Bourdieu’s overemphasis on the ‘constancy of the habitus’.
Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the connections between structure and
agency is additionally problematic in that it lacks a strong concept of
subjectivity. From Bourdieu’s perspective, the subject is generated by the
perceptions, classifications and dispositions of the habitus. As a conse-
quence of the overemphasis on the structural constraints of the habitus, he
gives us few theoretical tools for conceptualizing active practices of self-
fashioning and resistance to the structures of power. In other words, his
theory of action pays insufficient attention to the constitution of actors, as
Calhoun (1993: 84) has also noted. Whereas McNay (2000) has pointed out
that Bourdieu’s work neglects female subjectivity, this is in fact true for
subjectivity in general. While Bourdieu offers us a subtle account of the
relations between practice and power, he fails to provide us with a
conceptualization of subjectivity that, ultimately, would allow for critical
agency. At the end of Masculine Domination, he presents a gloomy expla-
nation of the permanence of gender inequality, but no answer to the crucial
questions of how this order can be transformed or how women can stop
being accomplices to the symbolic domination to which they are subjected.
Concluding remarks
In this final section of my assessment of Bourdieu’s work on gender, I would
like to raise a number of additional questions centring, first, on Bourdieu’s
conceptualization of gender and sexuality; second, on his understanding
of power and domination; and, third, on his analysis of the areas and agents
of reproduction of the gender order.
First, the model of gender differences that Bourdieu adopts throughout
Masculine Domination as well as his other writings on gender is problem-
atic in that it conceptualizes femininity and masculinity in purely binary
terms and as (implicitly) stable. Bourdieu’s model of binary gender differ-
entiation is overly anchored in his account of Kabyle society and ignores
the plurality of gender scripts that are available in modern social life. As a
consequence of structural changes to the gender order resulting from trans-
formations in the work sphere, feminist activism and other factors, the
meanings of male as well as female identity have been redefined over the
past decades. Although male domination is the central topic of the book,
Bourdieu treats masculinity as a homogeneous identity and, surprisingly,
ignores the disintegration of the traditional model of masculinity into a
multitude of competing scripts. These scripts range from the fundamental-
ist reaffirmation of what Connell (1995) terms ‘hegemonic masculinity’ by
men’s movements, such as the ‘Promise Keepers’, to transformative models
of male identity. Bourdieu also neglects other recent changes such as the
effects on masculinity of the increased exposure of men to the gaze of visual

consumer culture (Haiken, 2000). In the rare passages analysing mascu-

linity as such, Bourdieu reduces this concept to virility (understood as
competition with other men), thereby failing to recognize, in particular, the
importance of work as the traditional basis of male identity. Correspond-
ingly, he also ignores the profound effects of the recent erosion of this basis,
which has been described by authors such as Faludi (1999). In overem-
phasizing the ‘transhistorical continuity of the relation of masculine domi-
nation’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 102), Bourdieu ‘fails to acknowledge historical
variations in the gender order’, as Fowler (2000: 2) points out in more
general terms.
The second issue concerns Bourdieu’s understanding of the gender order.
This understanding is anchored in a theorization of power in binary terms,
in which men ‘possess’ power and oppress the ‘victims’ (women). Much
has been written within feminist theory to question similarly reductionist
views of gender relations, which are problematic in ignoring the possi-
bilities for transformative agency. Bourdieu’s account also neglects the
complexity and multilayeredness of relations between the genders whereby
relations of power may partly overlap and partly contradict each other
within different areas of social life. This is all the more surprising since
Bourdieu’s theory of fields offers precisely the type of theoretical flexibility
that would allow for conceptualizing gendered relations of power in more
differentiated terms.
Similar to his account of gender power, Bourdieu also understands domi-
nation as an undifferentiated state. This has consequences not only for his
conceptualization of the domination of men over women, but also for his
view of political agency. Whereas Bourdieu’s early writings expressed
hostility towards the contamination of the search for scientific truth by
political activism, in the last decade of his life he became active in a
number of political struggles. He was particularly engaged in the struggle
against neoliberalism or ‘la mondialisation’, as the French prefer to call it.
He promoted ‘une gauche de gauche’ – a Left that would refuse the kind of
compromises that the French socialist party (in power during those years)
had made, especially its complicity in what Bourdieu considered to be the
neoliberal destruction of the welfare state. From the mid-1990s, he was
thus involved in controversial interventions with social movements,
attempting to transform these into a generalized European social movement
against the ‘fascisation’ of neoliberalism. His theoretical and political
stances are reflected in Masculine Domination. Reflecting a rather dated
view of feminist activism, he calls (in the preface to the English rather than
the French edition) upon feminists ‘to engage in a political action that
breaks with the temptation of the introverted revolt of small mutual
support groups’ (2001: viii), and to join the more general struggle against
symbolic domination with other victims such as gays and lesbians.
Bourdieu thereby adopts a problematically undifferentiated view of domi-
nation, but also glosses over the issue of (divergent) interests. Past experi-
ences have demonstrated that such alliances are neither automatic nor
unfraught (see, for example, Jackson, 1998).
The emphasis on the commonality of experience of victimhood of an

undifferentiated symbolic violence between women and homosexuals is

linked to Bourdieu’s view of sexual identity. On the one hand, Bourdieu
correctly emphasizes how deeply intertwined are social constructions of
gender and sexual identity. On the other hand, Masculine Domination
suffers from a problematic and at times stereotypical reading of homo-
sexual identity in terms of heterosexual gender scripts, for example, when
he asserts that ‘in the couples that they [gay men] form, they often repro-
duce, as do lesbians, a division of male and female roles that does not tend
to bring them closer to the feminists’ (2001: 119). Bourdieu’s overlapping
of sexuality and gender fails to acknowledge the complexity and multi-
plicity of models of sexual identity and reproduces to some extent the flaws
of his overemphasis on binary gender differentiation in his understanding
of male and female identities. Bourdieu’s understanding of intimate
relationships is additionally problematic because of his views on love.
Indeed, in a ‘postscript on domination and love’, Bourdieu argues that
‘pure love’, which is based on full reciprocity, mutual recognition, trust,
fusion and communion, offers the possibility of a break with the order of
domination, suspending the struggle for symbolic power (2001: 110ff.).
Surely, however, such a romantic view of love seems rather naïve; it fails
to acknowledge that even true love is conditioned by cultural scripts that
are heavily gendered.
The final issue that I want to raise concerns Bourdieu’s account of the
agents and areas of reproduction of the gender order. As argued above,
Bourdieu fails to provide arguments as to why he considers schools,
churches and especially the state, rather than the domestic sphere, to be
the primary agents of gender differentiation. His view of the state is
additionally problematic in that it reduces the state to a mere negative
instrument of masculine domination. Bourdieu thus fails to acknowledge
the more positive roles that the state can adopt regarding the gender order.
As feminist authors such as Dahlerup (1987), Hernes (1987) and Siim
(1988) have pointed out, the welfare state has, for example, reduced the
financial dependency of women on men. Other authors have pointed out
the possibility of an institutionalization of women’s interests through the
actions of femocrats (feminist bureaucrats) working within rather than
against the state. Finally, as poststructuralist views of the state recognize,
the state consists of a multiplicity of arenas of struggle rather than behaving
as a homogeneous agent (see Waylen, 1998).
To conclude, we can read Masculine Domination in two ways. If we treat
the book as a general contribution to theories of gender, Bourdieu’s contri-
bution will seem decidedly underwhelming. However, as a fleshing out of
blind spots in Bourdieu’s own work, Masculine Domination is far more
interesting. His oeuvre as a whole has been instrumental in shifting the
focus of theories of action from a concern with meaning and interpretation
to issues around power and agency, the body, gender and sexuality.
Bourdieu has importantly conceptualized gender and sexuality as political
problems rather than ‘natural givens’. As I have shown, his analysis of the
gendered nature of symbolic violence raises a number of critical questions,
in particular his failure to acknowledge gender as ‘power’ rather than as

‘difference’. Consequently, Masculine Domination is more helpful as an

explanation of the perpetuation of gender differences than as an analysis
of gender power. Bourdieu’s work is nonetheless an important reminder
that the gendered body and sexuality are crucial sites of the play between
power and resistance.
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Véronique Mottier is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Lecturer in

Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University. Her publications
include Politics of Sexuality (edited with T. Carver; Routledge, 1998) and
Genre et Politique (edited with L. Sgier and T.-H. Ballmer-Cao; Gallimard,
2000). She is a member of the editorial committee of Nouvelles Questions
Féministes and an associate editor of Feminist Theory.
Address: Jesus College, Cambridge CB5 8BL, UK. Email:
vm10004@hermes.cam.ac.uk


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Feminist Theory

Masculine domination: gender and power in Bourdieu's writings

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346 Feminist Theory 3(3)

The politics of social theory

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Mottier: Masculine domination 347

unrecognized. As Giddens, for example, noted: ‘to regard social agents as

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348 Feminist Theory 3(3)

Bourdieu’s theory of practice

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Mottier: Masculine domination 349

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350 Feminist Theory 3(3)

1982: 36). He thus develops a subtle reconceptualization of the connections

Gender and domination

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Mottier: Masculine domination 351

the understanding of the objective structures and cognitive structures of a particu-

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352 Feminist Theory 3(3)

As a result of symbolic violence, Bourdieu argues, women tend to misrec-

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Mottier: Masculine domination 353

The reproduction of the habitus combined with the relative autonomy of

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354 Feminist Theory 3(3)

(Calhoun, 1993: 72 ). As Lash (1993: 203) puts it, Bourdieu’s theoretical

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Mottier: Masculine domination 355

consumer culture (Haiken, 2000). In the rare passages analysing mascu-

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356 Feminist Theory 3(3)

undifferentiated symbolic violence between women and homosexuals is

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Mottier: Masculine domination 357

‘difference’. Consequently, Masculine Domination is more helpful as an

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358 Feminist Theory 3(3)

Fowler, B. (2000) ‘Pierre Bourdieu and La Domination Masculine’, Iran

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Mottier: Masculine domination 359

Véronique Mottier is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Lecturer in

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