3.5 Baby!
One day I wanted to explain myself to myself…and it struck me with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was ‘I am a woman.’
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| — | Simone de Beauvoir |
It follows from Bourdieu’s understanding of the social effects of gender divisions that the dominant group - in this case men - do not escape the burdens of their own dominations.
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| — |
Toril Moi note: applies to the men in recuerdo… |
brooks: “any attempt to improve the condition of women by ignoring or obliterating the intellectual differences between them and men must result in disaster to the race”
——> while beauvoir would agree and not ignore the differences between men and women, she wouldn’t go so far as to say it will be disastrous to do so, and definitely not insinuate that men and women are completely saturated by their biological differences.
TO MYSELF
YOU ARE FUCKING NOT ALLOWED TO FUCKING SLEEP UNTIL YOU FUCKING FINISH YOUR THESIS, DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND????
Love, you
Field and Habitus Notes (from Moi)
Field & Habitus - Bourdieu’s key terms, deeply interdependent
Field - competitive system of social relations which functions according to its own specific logic or rules.
- Bourdieu: “an area, a playing field, a field of objective relations among individuals or institutions competing for the same stakes,
Habitus - Bourdieu: “a system of dispositions attuned to the game of the field.”
- each field generates its own specific habitus
- Bourdieu: “for a field to work, there must be stakes, and people ready to play the game, equipped with the habitus which enables them to know and recognize the immanent laws of the game, the stakes and so on”
- The totality of general dispositions acquired through practical experience in the field
- those norms and values that are inculcated through the very forms of classroom interaction, rather than through any explicit teaching project.
More notes on Moi’s “Appropriating Bourdieu
- Aim of essay: to show that a Bourdieuian approach enables us to reconceptualize gender as a social category in a way which undercuts the trad’l essentialist/non-essentialist divide.
- Bourdieu’s originality - his dev’t of a microtheory of social power: will show exactly how one can analyse teacher’s comments on student’s papers, rules for examinations, students’ choices of different subjects in order to trace the specific and practical construction an implementation of a hegemonic ideology
- in other words, Bourdieu makes sociological theory out of EVERYTHING — refusing to distinguish between ‘high’/’significant’ and ‘low’/’insignificant’ matters, Bourdieu will analyse various ways of chewing one’s food, different forms of dressing, musical tastes ranging from a predilection for “Home on the Range” to a liking for John Cage, home decoration, etc…
- Moi’s interest in Bourdieu is grounded in the conviction that what patriarchal minds find trivial such as gossip, women’s gossip, is in fact sociologically significant. “It is possible to link the humdrum details of everyday life to a more general social analysis of power” ——> FORM OF RECUERDO - mother-daughter E-MAILS, written in colloquial, non-formal language
- Bourdieu’s approach - seeks to undo or overcome the traditional individual/social or private/public divide. —-> RECUERDO what is private is public, being both a record of one woman’s history as well as the nation’s.
Just as it is absurd to try to reduce the enonce to the enonciation (for instance by claiming that every statement can be fully explained by one’s so-called ‘speaking position’), it is just as absurd to treat texts as if they were not the complex products of a historically and socially situated act of utterance, the enonciation.
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| — | Toril Moi, Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture |
