Oscillating Masculinity in Bourdieu's La Domination masculine

Oscillating Masculinity in Bourdieu's La Domination masculine Todd W. Reeser and Lewis C. Seifert PIERRE BOURDIEU'S LA DOMINATION MASCULINE (1998, hereafter DM) has become quite probably the most visible text on the subject of masculinity and power in France today.1 Nearly every major French publication reviewed the text when it came out (including Télérama, which published a series of interviews with Bourdieu), and the sociologist's work is often mentioned in French discussions of male identity.2 Despite this cultural visibility, Bourdieu has been widely critiqued, particularly by feminists who see the sociologist as coopting studies of male power and gender relations without citing or perhaps even being aware of his feminist precedents . A number of critics also argue that DM presents nothing new in terms of gender identity and gender relations. Janine Mossuz-Lavau sums up much of the critique: "Tout au long de la description des grands traits de cette domination , on retrouve donc des éléments familiers à quiconque a peu ou prou pratiqué les 'gender studies' même si les évolutions les plus récentes apparaissent peu."3 Bourdieu's remarks on homosexuality, productive on one level because they give visibility to the gay and lesbian movement, have also provoked criticism.4 As legitimate as they are, critiques such as these should not overshadow what could be considered new in this text. In DM, Bourdieu makes explicit how the sociological apparatus developed over the course of his career dovetails with questions related to gender. A number of feminist critics have articulated the theoretical advantages of this convergence for feminist and gender studies.5 In this grain, we will examine how DM articulates not simply a theory of power and gender relations, but also theoretical approaches to masculinity that overlap with and depart from post-modernist work on masculinity , especially in Anglo-American literary and cultural studies. We are interested both in how DM approaches masculinity from a theoretical perspective and in how it stops short of, or even resists articulating, certain aspects of masculinity. This approach is on one level unfair to the text since, as counterintuitive as it might seem, masculinity is not the primary concern. Yet at the same time, Bourdieu's study nonetheless—and, we would add, necessarily— evinces theoretical approaches to masculinity that render it an important case study in how masculinity has been conceived in recent French theory. Our Vol. XLIII, No. 3 87 L'Esprit Créateur reading will focus on the simultaneous stability and instability of masculinity, but it will also consider how the tension or oscillation between these two poles can be read as one of the defining elements of DM. After first discussing how this simultaneity operates in general and then in terms of masculinities au pluriel, we will propose a reading of the text whereby this oscillation can be located within and as male subjectivity. Bourdieu's Masculinity From a certain perspective in Anglo-American gender studies, Bourdieu's approach might well be considered social constructionist. If Bourdieu does not define masculinity as such, he does study the relational construction of masculine and feminine positions within the various social fields where men and women interact (e.g. in the domestic sphere, work place, educational and political institutions, etc.).6 As he states, "[n]'ayant d'existence que relationnelle , chacun des deux genres est le produit du travail de construction diacritique , à la fois théorique et pratique, qui est nécessaire pour le produire comme corps socialement différencié au genre opposé ..." (29). In this model (which we will problematize), gender identities are also relational because they are variable, depending on the social contexts in which they exist and function. Bourdieu does not speak of gender identity per se, but rather of the habitus, the set of unspoken (and largely unconscious) dispositions acquired through experience in social interactions. Not unlike gender identity, the gendered habitus naturalizes the differences between the masculine and the feminine , and is both the social construction of gendered norms and the individual experience of those norms. Formed relationally, the gendered habitus is at first glance a dynamic construct . For Bourdieu, the masculine habitus implies a relation of domination within...