Masculine Domination

ISBN-13: 9780745622644 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 144 str.

Pierre Bourdieu

Opis

Male domination is so anchored in our unconscious that we hardly perceive it any more; it is so much in line with our expectations that we find it difficult to call into question. Pierre Bourdieu's ethnographic description of Kabyle society, a veritable reservoir of the Mediterranean unconscious, provides a powerful instrument to dissolve taken-for-granted truths and explore the symbolic structures of this androcentric unconscious which survives in today's men and women. But the discovery of permanences obliges us to overturn the habitual manner in which we frame the problem. How does the historical work of dehistoricization operate? What are the mechanisms and the institutions - family, church, school or state - which accomplish the work of reproduction? Is it possible to neutralize them in order to liberate the forces of change which they succeed in fettering?

Spis treści

Preface to the English edition: Eternalizing the arbitrary.

Prelude.

1 A magnified image.

2 Anamnesis of the hidden constants.

3 Permanence and change.

4 Conclusion.

5 Postscript on domination and love.

Appendix: Some questions on the gay and lesbian movement

O autorze

Pierre Bourdieu was Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France.

Blurb

Masculine domination is so deeply ingrained in our unconscious that we hardly perceive all of its dimensions. It is so much in line with our expectations that we struggle to call it fully into question. Pierre Bourdieu′s ethnographic analysis of gender divisions in Kabyle society, as a living reservoir of the Mediterranean cultural tradition, provides a potent instrument for disclosing the symbolic structures of the androcentric unconscious which survives in the men and women of our own societies.

Bourdieu analyses masculine domination as a paradigmatic form of symbolic violence – the kind of gentle, invisible, pervasive violence which is exercised through cognition and misrecognition, knowledge and sentiment, often with the unwitting consent of the dominated. To understand this form of domination we must analyse both its invariant features and the historical work of dehistoricization through which social institutions – family, school, church, state – eternalize the arbitrary at the root of men′s power. This analysis leads directly to the political question: can we neutralize the mechanisms through which history is continuously turned into nature, thereby freeing the forces of change and accelerating the incipient transformations of the relations between the sexes?

This new book by Pierre Bourdieu – which has been a bestseller in France – will be essential reading for students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities and for anyone concerned with questions of gender, sexuality and power.