SOURCE: Chodos, Howie, and Bruce Curtis. “Pierre Bourdieu's Masculine Domination: A Critique.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 39, no. 4 (November 2002): 397-412.

[In the following essay, Chodos and Curtis purport that Bourdieu's concepts in Masculine Domination are limited in their application.]

In a marked break with an earlier pessimism about the political potential of academic sociology (Mesney, 2002), Pierre Bourdieu extended his systematic program of social research to an increasingly public involvement with political questions in the decade before his death on 23 January, 2002. He organized and edited a multi-authored volume on the suffering provoked by capitalist globalization. He offered acerbic critiques of Anthony Giddens and the Blairite “third way” in the editorial pages of Le Monde. He denounced American cultural and economic imperialism for imposing its categories on social situations in which they do not apply, thereby distorting social scientific work. He engaged with groups of community activists in many parts of France in an effort to subvert the relations of symbolic violence and domination inherent to the current social order and he took to task those among his fellow intellectuals who engaged in what he denounced as “radical chic” (Bourdieu, 2001b; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999). As a recent feature-length film by Pierre Carles has shown, Bourdieu attempted to mobilize the formidable analytic and conceptual repertoire he had developed over several decades to make sociology into an effective instrument of political critique: in Bourdieu's own words, into a martial art. Such a sociology would embrace its enemy—domination—mastering its characteristic idioms, its strategies and tactics, its feints and gestures, and turn the strength of domination against itself (Carles, 2001).

This essay focusses on Bourdieu's recent attempt to come to terms with something he called “masculine domination” or “male domination.” This phenomenon had been a long-standing concern in Bourdieu's work. Masculine domination was announced as a matter for future research in The Logic of Practice (1990). Bourdieu addressed it more directly in an article-length piece before producing a short monograph that appeared, with considerable commercial success, in France in 1998 (Bourdieu, 1998). There were solid grounds for a preoccupation with this phenomenon for, as Bourdieu's collaborator and student Loïc Wacquant put it,

gender domination constitutes the paradigm of all domination and is perhaps its most persistent form. It is at once the most arbitrary and the most misrecognized dimension of domination because it operates essentially via the deep, yet immediate, agreement of embodied schemata of a vision of the world with the existing structures of that world.

(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 134, n)

The recent translation of Bourdieu's monograph, Masculine Domination (Bourdieu, 2001a), makes the arguments accessible to an English-language audience. The translation faces a considerable challenge, however, because it makes such foundational claims for masculine domination, and because it is aimed at an audience whose experience of feminist theory and practice is rather different than that of its original French readership.

It has to be said from the outset that Masculine Domination is a disappointing work. At a time when the way forward for many social movements is far from clear, serious reflection on the grounds on which masculinized power and privilege are reproduced, and on the means of eliminating them, might be furthered by analysing them as “masculine domination.” Unfortunately, Bourdieu never seems able to connect the broad ambitions of his theoretical plan to anything more than extremely general recommendations for action. While he places “masculine domination” on the analytic and political agenda, he fails to point to any weaknesses in the structures of domination that might encourage political strategies capable of subverting it.

We believe that this weakness stems from a failure on Bourdieu's part to make the best possible use of his own conceptual repertoire and, thus, that there is much to be gained from a critical encounter with his analysis. It is significant that a man who was perhaps the world's leading sociologist should devote an entire book to the topic of masculine domination. Bourdieu is boldly unapologetic for his address of the question, rejecting the monopoly claimed by those who would insist that only the dominated may speak of domination (2001a: 115, n). In this way, he breaks with gender essentialism and refuses a compartmentalization of work on the subject. And Bourdieu's intervention is timely. It takes place in a climate of morosity among many third-wave feminists. Feminists of this generation can look back on thirty years of struggle in perhaps the most successful social movement of the twentieth century, and yet see persistent features of patriarchal social relations combined with an apparent waning of interest in feminist issues on the part of a younger generation (for instance, Segal, 1999). We point to the weaknesses of Bourdieu's work before suggesting ways it may be salvaged.

Bourdieu's book presents three immediate difficulties. The most obvious and the most significant of these is that he never really tells us what he means by masculine domination. A second difficulty stems from Bourdieu's attempts to draw lessons for contemporary contestatory practice from the model of social relations provided by his well-known ethnographic work among the Kabyle peasantry of Algeria. Third, he invokes empirical descriptions of the condition and experience of “women” which frequently seem dated and of limited validity. This difficulty is compounded by an engagement with what seems often to be a rather passé body of English-language feminist theory. Arguments which might appear novel in French translation frequently seem tired when translated back into North American feminist debate, where contexts have changed.

The absence of a direct engagement with questions of definition makes it difficult to locate the heart of Bourdieu's argument. For a sociology that seeks to know its enemy in order to defeat it, a failure even to identify clearly that enemy is a startling weakness. What is “masculine domination”? Is it paradigmatic as a sexed variation of more general forms of domination on which its existence depends? Is it the originary form of domination, as the passage quoted above from Wacquant might suggest? Is it a specific form of domination in its own right? Without definitional clarity, the points of attack remain hidden.

It is true that there are hints and half-definitions of masculine domination throughout the book, and a well-known list of the consequences of contemporary gender regimes is compiled. We are told that the issue is “the asymmetry between the sexes” and “a society organized through and through according to the androcentric principle” (Bourdieu, 2001a: 3). “Androcentric reason, itself grounded in the division of the social statuses assigned to men and women,” we are told, imposes principles of division between the sexes (2001a: 15). The phallus is a powerful signifier because of the “androcentric worldview” (2001a: 23) and women's use of their bodies “remains very obviously subordinated to the male point of view” (2001a: 29). Empirical studies in feminist sociology are invoked to suggest that women learn to disdain their bodies, to accept that the tasks they accomplish are denigrated, to put up with the double day of labour while working in feminized jobs for less than equal pay. We hear less about men, even though “male privilege is a trap” (2001a: 50) from which men would do well to escape. We do learn that men take joy in violence, live their sexual relations as relations of conquest, and ultimately are deeply afraid of the feminine in themselves (2001a: 50-52). Yet hints and lists are of little help in explaining either the causes for, or the means of combating, something we might call “masculine domination,” and the large categories “men” and “women” are essentializing, even if Bourdieu cautions that they are analytic instruments and not empirical entities. While they may help to present the problem to be grappled with, they obscure potential solutions.

Nonetheless, a strength of this book is that Bourdieu has posed the central question with respect to asymmetrical relations of gendered power and privilege with some clarity. He remarks that “it is indeed astonishing to observe the extraordinary autonomy of sexual structures relative to economic structures, of modes of reproduction relative to modes of production.” And he asks,

How do we take account of this apparent perenniality, which moreover plays a considerable part in giving the appearances of a natural essence to a historical construction, without running the risk of ratifying it by inscribing it in the eternity of a nature?

(2001a: 81-82)

By way of answer, Bourdieu seeks to provide us with the means both to understand the quasi-universality of masculine domination and to grasp the underlying social conditions that sustain it across time and place. To do this he urges us to employ “a truly relational approach to the relation of domination between men and women as it establishes itself in the whole set of social spaces and subspaces” (2001a: 102, emphasis in the original).

One dimension of this argument is to take the organization and reproduction of social relations in Kabylia as a kind of laboratory experiment through which to reveal “the androcentric unconscious that is capable of objectifying the categories of that unconscious” (2001a: 5). The unconscious is a historical product for Bourdieu, as are social structures. He claims that there is a “‘phallonarcissistic’ vision and androcentric cosmology” common to all Mediterranean societies, which survives in a partial and exploded form “in our own cognitive structures and social structures.” Kabylia is paradigmatic for a “Mediterranean tradition” and Bourdieu claims that “the whole European cultural domain undoubtedly shares in that tradition” (2001a: 6). Given the significance of this claim, one might anticipate that Bourdieu would provide a genealogy of the social and psychic structures that sustain the patterns of relations to which he objects. He does not do so. There is no account offered of the origins of a “Mediterranean tradition,” nor of its diffusion, nor is there any attempt to analyse the extent to which such a tradition might have been modified or contested in areas of the world influenced by it.

Instead, Bourdieu gives another rendition of Kabylia as a functioning society, in this case as one in which differences between and differential evaluations of the sexes are inscribed in bodies and things, in the topography of the household and the market, in linguistic expressions and in aesthetic sensibility. Thus we see the system of homologous oppositions into which female/male are inserted at work in the division of the house into the lower, dark, wet, women's side and the higher, light, dry, men's side (2001a: 10). We see these oppositions inscribed in bodies through such things as carriage (women, small, bent, eyes on the ground; men, drawn-up, erect, eyes looking into the eyes of other men), speech (for women, hesitant, tentative, timid; for men, clear, declarative, unambiguous), and so on. Bourdieu gives us a strong sense of the incessant labour required to naturalize these artificial distinctions. He shows us how these institutions are reproduced through the work of instituting: boys, for instance, leave the sphere of women/house and enter the world of men/market through a rite which involves the first haircut.

Yet how does Bourdieu suggest that the analysis of the situation in Kabylia can inform our understanding of the contemporary European (and North American) world? Clearly, he wants to argue that contemporary European societies share in a common tradition with Kabylia as far as an “androcentric vision” is concerned. Unfortunately, he never gives us a systematic and historical account of the nature of this social order, and one is left with the feeling that he has proceeded in a manner directly antithetical to his desire to provide us with an historical account of the persistence of masculine domination. He does not locate the various practices he describes in the total context of the Kabyle social order, and in consequence we are unable to draw lessons for our own contemporary situation.

Practically, Bourdieu elides the need for analysis by engaging in a search for examples of an “androcentric principle” at work in contemporary European social relations and conditions. The feminist literature of the 1970s and 1980s is raided for (often dated) examples of the economic, cultural, sexual, and political subordination of women in the capitalist west. Bourdieu notes that there are sharp differences in taste between the sexes and, in the paid labour force, women predominate in the caring occupations. Men manage female office staff and work performed by men is better paid than that of women. Women's public personae are those of helpmeet and hostess, like the media personality who introduces authoritative speakers but never speaks authoritatively. The Kabyle principle that constrains women to remain invisible is obvious in the fact that women in Europe do not acquire occupational titles congruent with the importance of the work they do (2001a: 61). Other pairs in the set of homologous binaries that organize masculine domination in Kabylia also continue: Bourdieu points to the glass industry, where men do the hot work around the furnace, while women do the cold work of inspection (2001a: 61, n).

The binaries inscribed in social space remain inscribed in categories of perception, and masculine domination constitutes women as the objects of a masculine gaze. Bourdieu cites evidence to claim that women see parts of their bodies as “too big” while men see theirs as “too small.” Women exist in a state of insecurity around their bodies because these are always the objects of the gaze of domination and this creates a state of dependence on others that is generalized. The operation of domination works through the creation of dispositions. Thus, while “masculine domination has lost part of its immediate self-evidence, some of the mechanisms which underlie this domination continue to function” in contemporary Europe (2001a: 56).

At his strongest, most insightful, and most controversial, Bourdieu probes the complicity of women in the practices that sustain masculine domination. He criticizes the general tendency on the part of those interested in challenging domination to idealize the condition of the dominated in the name of solidarity “and to pass over in silence the very effects of domination.” To avoid this tendency, he claims, one “has to take the risk of seeming to justify the established order by bringing to light the properties through which the dominated … as domination has made them, may contribute to their own domination” (2001a: 114). For part of this analysis, Bourdieu offers an insightful re-reading of the relations between the Ramsays in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. He is concerned not simply to show the ways in which Mr. Ramsay enunciates the law of the father, but more especially with Mrs. Ramsay's insights into and complicity with his capacity to do so. She is shown to be aware of the game of power that Mr. Ramsay plays, to see the fragilities in his ability to play it and yet to underwrite them. She is not herself disposed to play the game of power and the weapons she has at her disposal are those of the weak—weak weapons.

But one cannot help feeling that many of the specific forms of masculine domination that Bourdieu describes are no longer quite as universal as he suggests. For example, he writes that,

The world of work is full of little isolated occupational milieus (a hospital staff, the office of a ministry, etc.) functioning as quasi-families in which the staff manager, almost always a man, exercises a paternalistic authority, based on emotional envelopment or seduction.

(2001a: 58)

Once again, there are no doubt many workplaces where the dynamics he describes predominate, but the apparent progress of feminist struggle seems to be discounted. The evidence presented points to the persistence of masculine domination, but tells us very little about how it has been and continues to be challenged. The more dramatic accomplishments of third-wave feminism are nowhere obvious.

Of course, the further evolution of the forms of social interaction that allow masculine domination to be reproduced helps place the central question referred to above in even sharper relief. Despite the progress women continue to make, there remains something we might call masculine domination that manages nonetheless to assert itself and to succeed in ensuring that the commanding heights of social, political and economic power generally remain in the hands of men. Bourdieu's hypothesis would seem to be that masculine domination has become so profoundly anchored in our daily lives that its reproduction cannot be easily prevented, even when people are committed to opposing it. Attempts to overthrow masculine domination reproduce asymmetrical relations in new forms.

We approached Bourdieu's Masculine Domination with an enthusiastic interest in his elaboration of a “constructivist structuralism” (Bourdieu, 1994; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). This approach promises to take us beyond the structure-agency and subject-object binaries which have operated as sociological set pieces for several decades now, by attending to a “logic of practice.” Bourdieu seeks to overcome the subject-object divide by insisting that social structures are lived and actively reproduced by individuals and groups who embody structural principles as predisposing dispositions, or “habitus.” Social practice in the broadest sense is approached through a game analogy. Individuals and groups are equipped through socialization and by their location in relation to scarce resources—economic, political, cultural—with a set of objective and subjective possibilities for strategic participation in social contests, which take place in more or less clearly bounded fields.

While Bourdieu is fond of the soccer analogy initially employed by Merleau-Ponty, we might think instead of the person plagued with gimpy knees playing defence in ice hockey (on the relation with Merleau-Ponty, see Crossley, 2001). Given the rules of the game, and a set of embodied capacities (including the capacity to “read the play”) a person so equipped will tend to adopt the tactical repertoire known as “staying at home.” “Staying at home” will exist as an objective possibility in the structure of the game itself, and as a subjective preference on the part of players positioned to take advantage of it. Yet games are fluid and changing. One of the stakes in any game is the rules of play; one of the strategies always present is that of changing the rules in the interest of some set of players—and, conversely, of insisting on the maintenance of rules that presently favour the dominant players or teams.

Strategies and resources are also to be understood in terms of their historic unfolding. In any ongoing game we can point to the “state of play” as a condition that leads to a differential valuation of strategies and resources. The gimpy-kneed defenceman is more likely to attempt to rush the puck faced with a losing score in the dying minutes of the game, or at the beginning of the game when the contest is still open, than in the middle of a close contest. The specific mix of resources that any player can command will also be subject to differential valuation, according to that player's own trajectory in relation to the game: accumulated experience as opposed to raw talent, for example. Or, in the academic game, we might think of the middle-aged, middle-ranked, mediocre sociology professor hoping to inherit the mantle of functionalist sociology's earlier dominance by not making any waves (“conservation strategies”), as opposed to the ambitious, younger, post-structuralist theorist claiming it is time for sociology's demise (“subversion strategies”) (Bourdieu, 1975; 2001b: 124-25). Bourdieu's game analogy thus suggests the existence of a logic of practice immanent to any field of social relations in which the shifting balance of strategies (related to a distribution of resources that is itself an object of struggle and hence more or less fluid) intersects with the established rules of the game to propel changes in both rules and strategies.

And yet there are two fairly clear analytic tensions in Bourdieu's approach as an analysis of social change: latent functionalism and latent subjectivism. The risk is that one might use this schema to argue that structural forces equip agents with the dispositions necessary to reproduce structures. If the principles—the habitus—underlying structures are inscribed in agents in ways which predispose agents to follow strategies appropriate to their structural location, then why would we assume agents would do anything other than embrace their destiny? Conversely, if agents adopt innovative strategies in a given field of struggle, one might be tempted to interpret these as anchored in a human creativity which is at the least not carefully analysed through a concept of “predisposing dispositions.” Either tendency would trap us once again in an agency-structure binary or dialectic and would leave the prospects for struggle against domination unclear.

Bourdieu has repeatedly denounced the appeal to either tendency as a basic misunderstanding of his work. On the one hand, there may be dissonance between habitus and structural location: the Algerian peasants faced with French capitalist initiatives in the 1960s were not equipped with the kinds of capital required of proletarians. Liberation struggles, presumably, could be read as attempts to change the rules of the game of power in a situation, like the colonial one, in which the conditions of play have changed dramatically. Again, Bourdieu argues the capacity to act in a consciously deliberative fashion may be one of the capacities incorporated in habitus that emerges in times of crisis.

Times of crisis, in which the routine adjustment of subjective and objective structures is brutally disrupted, constitute a class of circumstances when indeed “rational choice” may take over, at least among those agents who are in a position to be rational.

(1990: 130-31)

As Mesney (2002) shows, Bourdieu recently pointed to the growing dissonance between habitus and social structures, which he called “hysteresis,” propelled in part by increased access to education, as one ground on which academic sociology might aspire to political relevance. And Bourdieu also objected repeatedly that charges of functionalism neglect the fact that his approach focusses on social practice. Even the most mundane, routinely iterated social practices have to be performed in an ongoing manner if they are to exist. Repeated iterations are not slavish replications, because strategic situations change and because agents are themselves changed through the weight of their past engagements in fields.

These objections seem to us to be sound in principle, but they seem not to be adopted in Masculine Domination, which offers no analysis of practical transformation, either in traditional Kabylia or in contemporary Europe. For all his insistence on the transformative nature of practice, Bourdieu also maintains that “in a situation of equilibrium, the space of positions tends to command the space of position-takings” (1990: 105; his emphasis). In the face of stable social arrangements, in other words, social agents will tend to embrace their destiny.

Lois McNay points out that it is precisely the concept of “field” that is underdeveloped in this part of Bourdieu's work (McNay, 1999). A more useful way of proceeding would have been to take up the three sources of transformation identified analytically and to employ them in analyzing contemporary practices of “masculine domination” in the field of gender/power relations. One of these sources stems from the dissonance between habitus and social structures occasioned by changes in the latter. A second source seems to come from particular qualities of habitus itself—its characteristic, at least for certain agents at certain moments, of engagement in deliberation and critical self-reflection. Finally, a third source is located in the messy actualities of practice. Yet none of these possibilities is taken up in Masculine Domination. Instead Bourdieu writes:

The constancy of habitus … 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 (as is shown by the frequently observed discrepancies between declarations and practices—for example, those men most favourable to equality between the sexes make no greater contribution to housework than others); moreover, being objectively orchestrated, they confirm and reinforce one another.

(2001a: 95)

In the case of masculine domination, at least, habitus does not seem to be vulnerable to the potential gap between structure and practical performance that would lead to its transformation; there is no hysteresis here. Against Bourdieu's frequently repeated insistence of the labile character of habitus in general, its gendered dimensions seem fixed.

While his choice of a static set of social practices as a model for masculine domination prevents Bourdieu from engaging in analysis of its possible subversion, Masculine Domination does, nonetheless, suggest two political strategies. It is true that one strategy is mentioned but not engaged, while the other is foreclosed whenever it is invoked, but they are worth considering briefly. The first strategy would be to identify the work of dehistoricization that sustains masculine domination and to confront it directly. Bourdieu enjoins us to shift our focus from recent visible changes in the condition of women in Western Europe and North America towards the “always ignored … question of the endlessly recommenced historical labour which is necessary in order to wrench masculine domination from history and from the historical mechanisms and actions which are responsible for its apparent dehistoricization” (2001a: 82-84).

We think this is indeed a possible line of attack. Demonstrating the constructed nature of existing relations—as the sex/gender distinction did, for instance—is a productive approach. However, Bourdieu's insistence on the durability of masculine domination does not allow him to engage with this strategy. The visible changes we see, Bourdieu argues, in no way constitute attacks on masculine domination since the binary oppositions that sustain it are simply reproduced in new guises. Women gain access to higher education, but the gender division remains in subject choices and professional qualifications. Women enter the labour force, but in ghettoized jobs. Women gain a greater control over biological reproduction, but heterosexual marriage is still the basis for the transmission of patrimony. “The changes visible in conditions in fact conceal permanent features in the relative positions” (2001a: 90). The resources in the game of domination change, but the structure of the gaps between men and women remains constant.

This apparently all-encompassing nature of masculine domination forces one to wonder exactly how it could ever be overcome. In fact, there is a debilitating circularity to Bourdieu's argument. Social processes that are so profoundly anchored that they are “below the level of consciousness and discourse” cannot be overcome simply through acts of collective will. One has to get at the underlying conditions and causes that allow these practices and institutions to reproduce themselves. His proclaimed strategy is thus, logically, to identify the social conditions that have historically sustained masculine domination throughout the ages. But, in order for these social conditions to have an explanatory significance, and thereby help point the way forward towards their own transcendence, they must in some sense be independent of the effects that they generate. They must possess some kind of internal dynamic that is understandable and alterable through human ingenuity, so that their “progressive withering,” a term Bourdieu himself employs to conclude the book, can come about. This final passage reveals the circularity to which he falls victim:

Only political action that really takes account of all the effects of domination that are exerted through the objective complicity between the structures embodied in both women and men and the structures of the major institutions through which not only the masculine order but the whole social order is enacted and reproduced … will be able, no doubt in the long term and with the aid of the contradictions inherent in the various mechanisms or institutions concerned, to contribute to the progressive withering away of masculine domination.

(2001a: 117)

Both the sources of masculine domination and its effects are located in the same all-encompassing set of social practices and institutions. The only way to undermine them that Bourdieu identifies is through the (unspecified) “contradictions inherent in the various mechanisms or institutions concerned.” This observation does not offer much to go on, especially since, on his account, such contradictions have merely managed to reproduce domination.

The second strategy for confronting masculine domination which Bourdieu seems implicitly to advocate would have us focus on those areas in which novel social practices attack directly, or produce consequences that undermine indirectly, the binary divisions of domination. Bourdieu himself identifies the practice of sport as a way in which the constitution of women's bodies as objects of the masculine gaze may be subverted. As he put it, the “intensive practice of a sport leads to a profound transformation of the subjective and objective experience of the body … it becomes a body for oneself” (2001a: 67). Yet Bourdieu immediately closes off this venue of transformation with a silly and outdated argument that women who practice sport are seen by men as potentially unfeminine or lesbian: the masculine gaze reasserts itself.

We do not wish to suggest that the increasing participation of women in amateur sport and the increasing visibility and popularity of such sports as women's hockey, tennis, and soccer simply undermine the cultural dominance of a masculinized gaze. The field of cultural representations of sexed bodies is far too contentious to offer any simple summary statement. Yet there seems no good reason to rule out the possibility that the practice of competitive and amateur sport may have transformative potential in relation to patterns of gendered domination. Unless masculine domination is invulnerable, there are no grounds for arguing, as Bourdieu does, that all alternative practices will be immediately recuperated by it. Surely the same is true for practices across a variety of fields. Moreover, precisely because masculine domination is diffuse, according to Bourdieu, we should expect that radical shifts in the rules in place in diverse fields of practice may change its nature. For instance, the nature of the economic field in Québec changed dramatically after 1964 when women ceased to be legally dependent persons in relation to the capacity to contract. Or again, the nature of the field of sexual practice changed dramatically after the mid-1960s when oral contraceptives became widely available in Canada and the United States (see Watkins, 1998).

Thus, the one-sidedness of his account leads Bourdieu to dismiss important contemporary trends in practice. He contradicts his affirmed intention of re-historicizing that which has been naturalized. He notes, for example, that “from earliest childhood, children are the object of very different collective expectations depending on their sex and that, in the scholastic situation, boys receive a privileged treatment (it has been shown that teachers devote more time to them, that they are more often asked questions, less often interrupted, and take a greater part in general discussions)” (2001a: 56, n). There is now, however, a body of evidence that suggests that, in some countries at least, girls are doing better overall than boys in school, despite still lagging behind in science and math. We also see, in countries such as Canada, women outnumbering men in university enrolment. While it remains true, as Bourdieu notes, that the upper levels of professional and academic life are dominated by men, it is an open question as to whether the increasing numbers of women working their way through the system will begin to dislodge at least some of those men who occupy the pinnacles of power.

Despite his repeated references to the invulnerability of binaries, Bourdieu neglects some that are of central importance to the discussion of masculine domination. We would argue that masculine domination manifests itself at two distinct levels, the social and the intersubjective. While there are links between them, they are nonetheless not only analytically, but also existentially, distinct. It is (at least theoretically) possible for men not to dominate women directly in their personal relations, yet to benefit from the social structure of masculine domination. To see why this is so, we need to look much more generally at how social structures operate: to move beyond the large categories of “men” and “women” in a stable relation of domination towards the analysis of practice in the field of gender/power relations.

Social structures attach differential costs to different courses of action by generating a differentiated set of enablements and constraints. Some people derive a degree of benefit (measured as wealth, power, privilege, status, etc.) that is denied to others, who are restricted to a more narrow range of options and who therefore have fewer opportunities to develop fully their individual capacities. But while they constrain our activity, social structures almost never dictate a single course of action and, just as importantly, they must be viewed as an enabling as well as a constraining environment for human activity.

By organizing and ordering human activity, social structures contribute to an increase in human powers. They also regulate the distribution of the benefits and burdens associated with the growth in capacities generated by improvements to social organization. From an evolutionary perspective, then, there are two possible “rational” reasons for the reproduction of any given set of human arrangements, including those that go under the heading of masculine domination—they can be retained because they allow a community to do certain things they would not otherwise be capable of doing, and they can survive because a dominant sub-group within the community derives a disproportionate benefit from them, and is able to impose its will on the rest of the community.

We can thus view social structures as modes of regulating the distribution of emergent capacities and of the benefits derived from their use. Each structural arrangement has its own independent dynamic that contributes to favouring certain kinds of activity and inhibiting others. All things being equal, an increase in the extent of human capabilities will constitute a valid reason for the retention of the form of social relations that enabled the new powers to arise, even if the benefit derived from those powers is an unequal one.

To illustrate, at the risk of oversimplifying somewhat, we can think of the overarching example of hereditary rule. Clearly, hereditary rule in all its various incarnations is an institutionalized form of social relations that has played a decisive role in human history. One can legitimately ask why this occurred, across such an enormous range of cultures, geographical locations and time periods. The answer that is suggested by the approach to the nature of social structures we have just outlined is that hereditary rule can constitute a rational form of transmitting acquired social knowledge under circumstances where there are limited resources available for the training of people to assume positions of power and responsibility. Concentrating the expensive training of leaders on a small number of people designated by birth can thus make good sense. It allows for the ways of doing things that have previously sustained a given social formation to continue to be utilized and then passed on to succeeding generations.

But this does not mean that hereditary rule as a form of social organization always remains rational, or that it is not also accompanied by enormous inequalities, perpetrating tremendous suffering on those not lucky enough to be born into the right families. In fact, the inequality that is inherent in any system of hereditary rule is one element that accounts for its (historically grounded) rationality. It allows for a concentration of resources that would not otherwise be possible and that is one of the conditions for the expansion of human capacities. However, societies that rely on hereditary rule for the transmission of social power would also seem to be especially prone to the confusion of the private interest of the ruling group with the public good. The ruling groups in these societies can, and do, act to sustain forms of social organization that are no longer justifiable on the kinds of rational grounds that may help explain the historical ubiquity of hereditary rule. Moreover, the progressive replacement of systems based on hereditary rule that has actually occurred over the past two centuries suggests the kind of dynamic that will be necessary to the elimination of masculine domination. Before returning to this issue, however, it is first necessary to discuss briefly the relationship between oppression and privilege.

Depending on how the differentiated distribution of advantages and disadvantages sustained by a given set of social arrangements affects different people, we can speak of them either being oppressed or benefiting from privilege. On this understanding, one is oppressed to the extent that one encounters the presence of socially reproduced obstacles to, or the absence of socially sustained opportunities for, the exercise of one's capacities. And one is privileged to the extent that one encounters fewer obstacles to, or benefits from more opportunities for, the exercise of one's capacities. Privilege and oppression describe situations in which some people have a relatively advantaged situation in comparison with others. They do not constitute absolute criteria. Oppression diminishes (though seldom entirely eradicates) the capacity for agency, while privilege enlarges the scope of one's agency. Privilege entails being able to do things others cannot and it accrues to members of a group regardless of the nature of their personal interaction with the oppressed group.

To take a simple example, a man would benefit from male privilege by going for a late-night stroll that a woman would avoid. While it is true that he derives a benefit from access to resources that are (at least in part) denied to women, his benefit is not a function of their exclusion. It is simply that men can do something more easily and with fewer constraints than can women. Were women as easily able to go for late-night walks as men, this would in no way diminish any given man's enjoyment of his own walk, nor infringe on his access to the resources he needs. If our streets were entirely crime-free and women were never harassed, there would be no male privilege involved in going for a late night stroll. Similarly, if everyone had the same opportunity to get the best university education possible, then it would be a matter of individual choice as to who took advantage of it and who not, rather than a matter of privilege for some. If gay and lesbian couples were treated the same as heterosexual ones there would be no privilege involved in a man kissing a woman in public. In all these cases there is not anything wrong with the “privileged” acts themselves but, because others cannot do them, despite wanting to (or never having been given the opportunity of asking themselves the question of whether or not they would like to try), there is privilege involved.

Oppression, the flip side of privilege, entails the imposition of restrictions on people's ability to utilize their capacities. Not every such restriction is necessarily the result of oppression but every instance of oppression involves some limiting of capacities. To be social, as opposed to personal, a particular form of oppression must affect a significant number of people who share some common set of experiences. This does not mean that everyone experiencing a given oppression will necessarily be restricted in the exercise of its capacities in exactly the same way or to the same extent. The existence of the oppression is defined by the social conditions that impose barriers to the exercise of certain capacities by specific categories of people. But it does not define how people respond to these restrictions, nor how each particular restriction compounds others. Many oppressions also enable, in that they group people together and provide them with opportunities that may otherwise have been absent, as illustrated by the often used example in classical Marxism of how the conditions of capitalism create the conditions for working class solidarity.

The dynamic of oppression and privilege involves the differential and unequal distribution of constraints and enablements resulting in some categories of people suffering under an excess of the former while others benefit from a surplus of the latter. This differential distribution produces privilege for some and oppression for others. It is precisely in this differential distribution that the causality of social structures resides. Oppression and privilege are thus the product of the same set of social arrangements, but there is a potential gap between the overall social impact and the individual circumstances of particular people. This means that some members of a social group that in general suffers the effects of oppression can nonetheless enjoy many kinds of privilege (think top women executives or leading Black athletes and entertainers), while many who benefit from some degree of privilege along one social axis can experience serious oppression along others.

This way of understanding the relationship between oppression and privilege helps to illuminate aspects of the nature of this dynamic that are often misconstrued. For example, it allows for an appreciation of how individuals who are members of a privileged group can benefit from privilege without being consciously aware of it, or without even necessarily being directly implicated in the oppression of those who are disadvantaged by the same set of social relations from which the privileged derive their advantage. While this will not be true of all the individuals whose interaction reproduces or transforms the social relations in question, since some will have to be actively involved in the perpetration of injustice, it nonetheless illustrates one of the ways in which social structures exert a causal influence that is independent of actual interaction between people.

It is only once we have located this gap between social structures and individual practices that it becomes possible to imagine a way forward, and to escape the circularity to which Bourdieu succumbed. But more is needed, as well. It is here that an evolutionary understanding of the ubiquity of masculine domination is important, by allowing us to recognize that the social usefulness of masculine domination has come to an end. The absence of a “rational” reason for retaining masculine domination opens the door to an immanent critique of contemporary social arrangements. Bourdieu is no doubt right that the elimination of masculine domination will be a protracted and multidimensional process. All those who are committed to seeing its ultimate eradication must both do the work of rehistoricization and attend to the myriad possibilities for transformation across evolving social fields.

Note

We read Bourdieu's book in a reading group that included Alan Craig, Alan Hunt, John Manwaring, Chris Powell, William Walters, and Melanie White. Our thanks to them and to the anonymous reviewers for the CRSA. This manuscript was first submitted in April 2002 and accepted in August 2002.

References

Bourdieu, P. 1975. “The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason.” Social Science Information, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 19-47.

Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice, transl. R. Nice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1993. La misère du monde. Paris: Seuil.

Bourdieu, P. 1994. Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l'action. Paris: Seuil.

Bourdieu, P. 1998. La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil.

Bourdieu, P. 2001a. Masculine Domination, transl. R. Nice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 2001b. Science de la science et réflexivité. Cours du Collège de France. 2000-2001. Paris: Éd. Raisons d'agir.

Bourdieu, P. and L. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourdieu, P. and L. Wacquant. 1999. “On the cunning of imperialist reason.” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 41-58.

Carles, P. 2001. La sociologie est un sport de combat. [Film].

Crossley, N. 2001. “Embodiment and social structure: A response to Howson and Inglis.” The Sociological Review. Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 318-26.

McNay, L. 1999. “Gender, habitus and the field: Pierre Bourdieu and the limits of reflexivity.” Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 95-117.

Mesney, A. 2002. “A view on Bourdieu's Legacy: Sens pratique v. hysteresis.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 59-67.

Segal, L. 1999. Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Watkins, E. S. 1998. On the Pill. A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.