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.
