The Gender Relationship in Bourdieu's Sociology

Bourdieu first entered the sociological discussion of the gender relationship in 1990 with his essay on "male domination," which appeared (revised) as a book in 1998. This makes him one of the very few sociologists to show, through an original contribution, that he takes this discussion seriously. He is one member of the discipline who cannot be reproached for being blind to gender in his analyses and empirical studies. Already in his earliest works he dealt with the relationships of the sexes, or with specific differences in the living conditions and social practices of men and women (cf. Bourdieu/Sayad 1964, Bourdieu/Passeron 1970, Bourdieu 1979, Bourdieu 1980). However, his contribution has scarcely been recognized by feminists, ¹ just as his sociology plays practically no role in gender studies, which nonetheless seeks to clarify its topic via a wide spectrum of theoretical approaches. In the following, I want to show that there are numerous affinities between Bourdieu's sociology and gender studies, which could give fresh impetus to research on gender relations in the social sciences.

Gender: Social Role or Dimension of the Habitus?

Among the central insights of gender studies is that "gender" is present in all social relationships. "Doing gender is unavoidable," as West and Zimmerman formulated in their 1987 essay, which gave a significant impetus to the debate on the social construction of gender. With this essay, they showed that gender is at work in all interactions; they also drew attention to the active process of the production of gender differences. But "gender" is also embedded in social structures in diverse ways, as studies on work and career sociology and on the research of organizations have emphatically shown (cf. Acker 1990, Cockburn/Ormrod 1993, Gottschall 2000, Krüger 1997, Maruani/Nicole-Drancourt 1989, Wetterer 1992). However, current sociological concepts prove unwieldy for considering the constant presence of gender in interactions, as well as for the gendering of social structures.

The "social role" is usually fallen back on in order to make sociologically comprehensible the differences between men and women in terms of living conditions and ways of acting and thinking. Granted, discussions of role theory have dwindled since their heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s. This does not mean, however, that the "social role" is relegated to the forgotten paradigms of the social sciences. The opposite is true--the problems and deficits of the role concept are forgotten, but not the concept itself. The social role has become a natural truism in the sociological repertoire--though detached from its structural-functionalist context of origin, which is no longer consciously present at all. As a "quasi-natural" category, the construct of the social role is no longer questioned; however, it is used nearly everywhere. Even studies that deal with the constructedness of gender, or with the constant presence of "gender" in interactions, argue easily with the term "role," although without any reference to the theoretical origin of this concept.

The concept of the social role goes back to Talcott Parsons, who spoke of "sex roles" early in his work (1942). In his studies on family, he elaborated this concept further and wove it into his all-embracing, functionally-grounded notion of society. He constructed a female role, which represents particular and expressive orientations and is directed inward to the maintenance of the family system, and he constructed a male role, which represents universal and instrumental orientations and is directed outward, through the primacy of gainful employment, and toward the maintenance of society. This notion of gender roles usually only becomes manifest, however, when it concerns the "role of the woman," while the male part is thematized above all in its splitting up into a multitude of different roles--as a supervisor, as a member of a professional or occupational association, as a soccer player, etc. The term is used in sociology, as in its everyday sense, in characterizing the social nature of gender-specifically different individual actions. According to...