Abstract
Introduction
Class analysis has been staple fare of the discipline of sociology. There have always been disputes about how class is to be defined and theorised, but its centrality to sociological thought was common ground across these disputes until well into the second half of the 20th century. Its pre-eminence began to be challenged in the second half of the 20th century with the thesis of the separation of ownership from control of the means of production (see for example Dahrendorf, 1957). The renewal of Marxist sociology from the 1960s stayed this challenge to some extent, but it has returned with renewed vigour with the decline of Marxist and other left-leaning sociologies from the 1990s. Among its modern heirs must be counted the various architects of the thesis of the individualization of society that in some versions 1 envisages a capitalism without class.
Those who would continue to speak of class must engage with questions concerning the units of class analysis that have troubled many feminists insofar as these are collectivities such as families and households rather than individuals. Those who theorize ‘individualization’ often align themselves with some aspects of feminism, and detect in the process of individualization in the context of global capitalism, not only the demise of class but also of patriarchy; they point to changes that have improved the position of women, and achieved some at least of the goals of feminism. Conversely, the sociological defence of class analysis is sometimes associated with a (muted) critique of feminism, often on the grounds of the neglect of social class.
In the first section of this chapter I shall look at the defence of conventional approaches to class mounted against feminist critics and also against ‘culturalist’ analyses by those that argue the necessity of speaking of a ‘family/household system’ that is pivotal in the processes of production, reproduction and transformation of class and gender privilege in the modern social world. The second section looks at ‘women’ as a category. Are social constructionists correct in maintaining a strict division between (biological) ‘sex’ and (socio-cultural) ‘gender’, or in gathering sexual difference itself into the domain of socio-cultural construction? What is the case for theorizing ‘women’ as a class, as do French materialist feminists? Should we rather understand gender groupings in terms of ‘status’? Is ‘seriality’ a useful alternative concept? The third section brings what has been established in the first two sections into a discussion of gender in Bourdieu's ‘social field’, the central concern of this chapter.
Section 1. Conflicts over class and gender
The individualization thesis: its promise for gender analysis
Some of the theorists of modern individualization have drawn from the resources offered by postmodernism, although not necessarily from the poststructuralist ‘linguistic turn’, and in doing so, have been willing to give culture and consumption a central position in the analytical frame. They detach socio-economic class from particular cultural formations, and culture, increasingly mediated by consumption, is held to be more formative of the social identities and allegiances of individuals than social class. Ulrich Beck has gone so far as to speak not only of a ‘capitalism without class’, but of ‘class’, alongside ‘family’, ‘neighborhood’ and other furniture of classical sociology as ‘zombie categories’ (Beck and Beck-Gersheim, 2001:203): the living dead of sociological discourse drained of their earlier vitality in the processes of identity-formation and purposive social action in modern society.
Individualization theory has certain attractions for feminists over more traditional structural sociologies. For in extending the social status of ‘individual’ to women, unlike the classical individualism that has been the target of numerous feminist critiques (see for example Pateman, 1988), it appears to afford a greater recognition of agency.
Secondly, the emphasis on consumption rather than rather than production in relationship to the formation of subjectivities and identities also puts gender into the foreground, given the responsibility for certain aspects of consumption that women have traditionally carried.
Thirdly, in locating the main source of women's oppression in the nature of these ‘zombie’ collectivities and in the secondary position of women within the labour market, individualization theory echoes and honours much 1970s feminist sociological analysis. Anthony Giddens (1992) posits a ‘transformation of intimacy’; 2 Manuel Castells attributes some of the characteristics of ‘the network society’, including the fragmentation of the patriarchal family and the emergence of new family forms, the changes in reproduction patterns and the increasing participation of women in the labour market, in part to the effects of the women's movements and feminism (Castells, 1997). The global ‘network society’ heralds, he claims, ‘the end of patriarchalism’. Beck and Beck-Gersheim's version of the individualization thesis analyses the effects of the transformation of the family and personal life. As primary collectivities are drained of life, so the ties that have bound women are correspondingly loosened, permitting a shift among young women away from the value of ‘living for others’ to the aspiration for a little bit of ‘a life of one's own’ (Beck & Beck-Gernshein, 2001). How could women, feminists or not, fail to feel the seduction of this hope and this promise?
In this chapter I shall focus not on the evidence that these ‘benefits’ are unequally distributed across lines of class and ‘race’, but on the charge that the ‘liberation’ achieved by (some) women may have masked, for feminists, an associated deepening of class inequalities (Fowler, 2003).
The renewal of class analysis
The reserve which feminists, since the advent of the WLM and the re-emergence of feminism in the late 1960s, have increasingly shown towards the more structural approaches that locate the units of social life in mixed sex collectivities, particularly those that are based on institutionalized heterosexuality – collectivities that have been imagined as ‘birth communities’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997) – has served to enhance the seductions of the individualization thesis. For these collectivities are typically internally differentiated in unequal power relations that disadvantage women, an inequality that tends to be lost from view in those forms of analysis that take them as the units of social life. Women seem to disappear into them without remainder, even where the focus of analysis is on the capitalist labour market into which women are recruited as individuals. There is a tacit assumption that the interests that women share in the fortunes of the family/household to which they belong override in importance those that are specific to their gender.
This was one of the main points at issue in the debate that took place in the 1980s in the pages of the journal Sociology. John Goldthorpe's paper in 1983 threw down the gauntlet to feminist critics of the conventional view, claiming that it was able to give a superior, more realistic, empirically-grounded and methodologically sound account of the position of women than did those that had argued that due attention to the position of women within class analysis had destabilised and even undermined traditional sociological approaches to class (Delphy, 1984; Oakley, 1981, and others. See also the response to Goldthorpe by Stanworth, 1984).
Feminist sociologists had mounted an extensive critique of sociological methods that measured social class in terms of the occupational status of ‘heads of households’, presumptively male. Women's own class status by virtue of their labour market participation is made invisible in this classing of the family/household. Goldthorpe gives a lengthy and in many ways impressive ‘defence of the conventional view’. He characterizes both views with lucidity:
i) [I]t is the family rather than the individual which forms the basic unit of social stratification; ii) particular families are articulated with the system of stratification essentially via the position of their male ‘head’ – which, in modern societies, can be most adequately indexed by reference to their occupational category or grade. This view is typically attacked on two rather different levels. First, it is argued that such a view entails a disregard of certain increasingly important features of contemporary ‘social reality’: most obviously, the proportion of families that do not have a male ‘head’; and the proportion of even ‘normal’ families in which the wife as well as husband is found in gainful employment – and perhaps in a different occupational category or grade to that of her husband. Secondly, though, and more fundamentally, it is held that the conventional view effectively precludes examination of what should be recognized as one major feature of the stratification system as a whole: that is, sexual stratification, which, of course, cuts directly through the conjugal family. It follows, then, that not only are women rendered largely ‘invisible’ within the study of stratification, but furthermore that the existence of sexual inequalities becomes more or less disregarded (Goldthorpe, 1983:465).
Goldthorpe argues that the conventional view provides the basis for a realistic appraisal of the position of women within social structures. On the increase in married women's labour market participation, he comments that ‘although the degree of women's economic dependence on their husbands may in this be somewhat mitigated, such employment typically forms part of a family strategy, or at all events, takes place within the possibilities and constraints of the class situation of the family as a whole’ (1983:469, emphasis added). For Goldthorpe women have a stake and often a voice in the development of ‘family strategies’ regarding their own labour-market participation. He puts the point succinctly: ‘lines of class division and potential conflict run between, but not through, families’ (Goldthorpe, 1983:469).
The position articulated by Goldthorpe may be taken here as the baseline: a robust defence of the conventional view that has, traditionally, informed sociological analysis of gender and class. There have been other less traditionalist defences. In a collection entitled Renewing Class Analysis (Crompton et al, 2000) a range of these are surveyed and sampled. Yet social class, across all the various attempts to renew class analysis that are represented in this collection, remains, fundamentally, a socio-economic category. The issues that dominated the mainstream sociological approach survive and are as troubling as they ever were in a world in which inequality is deepening, both within ‘western’ societies and globally: the ways in which class positions and relations are reproduced across generations, the ways in which it affects life chances, including life-expectation, health, access to education, educational attainment, employment trajectories, command of resources and so on. But the ‘renewals’ exemplified in this particular volume do not depart very far from the world of work and of economic practice, in spite of the fact that relatively neglected questions have emerged in the process: class processes in employment and the effects of the entry of women onto the labour market, especially married women, and gendered access to consumer services in the world of banking and finance. 3
The relative separation of ‘the economic’ from ‘the cultural’ is common across the conventional view and the various renewals of class analysis. I do not have space to develop this point here, but it is notable that feminist scholarship has been very often interdisciplinary, feeling the pull of the domain of ‘the cultural’ as critical in the analysis of forms of gender domination that cannot be wholly attributed to social structural factors.
Pierre Bourdieu was one of the 20th century's most prominent heirs to the classical sociological tradition, in which class is central, but his work is also distinguished by the attempt to construct a systematically integrated account of class and culture, and a distinctive inflexion of the concept of ‘class’, that I shall examine below. Because of this, his influence has been felt not only within the discipline of sociology but also that of cultural studies, including film and television studies, as well as upon sociology and its sub-disciplines, especially the sociology of education and the sociology of art. His influence upon feminism was slow to develop, but has grown among those who wish to contribute to ‘the renewal of class analysis’ especially those who have also been more deeply influenced by cultural studies than have most, though by no means all, of those who have centred their concerns exclusively on the world of work (Adkins and Skeggs, 2004).
Bourdieu's reflexive sociology has attracted a belated but growing, if critical, interest among feminists only in part because of his integrated approach to socio-economic class and culture. Dispersed throughout his massive oeuvre is a good deal of interesting comment on gender in the social field. With his publication of his work on masculine domination (Bourdieu, 1990, 2001) he has entered the lists in a more concentrated form, but has, paradoxically, attracted a good deal of sharply critical comment, especially from feminists in France (see Armangaud et al, 1993). So, to quote the title of an essay by Leslie McCall, ‘does gender fit?’ (McCall, 1992). Or perhaps how does gender fit into Bourdieu's reflexive sociology? Before turning to this question, the issue of ‘women’ as a category must be addressed.
Section 2. Women: biological sex, social class, status category or series?
Women and biology
The manner in which women's biology has been used to rationalize women's subordination (Sayers, 1982) has created within feminism, and not only sociological feminism, a strong commitment to social constructionist understandings of gender (see Witz, 2000). In the case of certain forms of contemporary feminist philosophy, sexual difference itself is understood to be socially constructed rather than biologically given (Butler, 1990, 1993). The nature and consequences of biological differences between the sexes have been fiercely contested within feminism. The ‘biological essentialist card’ is often too easily played whenever biological sexual difference is given any place at all within feminist analysis (see for example, the exchange over the working-class family between Barrett (1984, 1988) and Brenner and Ramas (1984)).
The feminist literary theorist Toril Moi, in her study of Simone de Beauvoir, borrowed the question posed by Beauvoir for her title. ‘What is a woman?’ Moi asks, with Beauvoir. She answers with a very simple, common sense definition: ‘a woman is … a person with a female body’ (Moi, 1999:8). Like the woman on the Clapham omnibus, Moi recognizes and begins with embodied biological sexual difference. She engages in an extended critique of Judith Butler, and argues that the existence of a variety of undecidable types of body does not in and of itself deconstruct the category of sexual difference. Neither does the fluidity and lack of fixity of ‘the biological’. She mounts a strong case against the distinction that circulates widely within feminist discourse between (biological) sex and (socio-cultural) gender. Whilst recognizing its usefulness in some contexts, these are strictly limited:
When it comes to thinking about what a woman is … the sex/gender distinction is woefully inadequate. Many critics appear to believe that a sexed human being is made up of the sum of sex plus gender. From such a perspective it does look as if everything in a woman or a man that is not sex must be gender and vice versa (Moi, 1999:35).
Moi further argues that feminists, including Butler, who have interpreted Beauvoir's work in terms of the sex/gender opposition, have misread it (Butler, 1986). She argues against the move of either incorporating biological sexual difference within gender, as Butler does, or reducing gender to biological sexual difference, the latter fuelling an understanding of women in terms of their biology as in the evolutionary psychology that is hegemonic in the media and popular understandings. For Moi, nobody who has a female body can be denied the title of ‘woman’ but women cannot be reduced to their female bodies: sexual difference does not permeate a woman through and through. So biological sexual difference remains in place in Moi's thinking. She finds an alternative to the sex/gender distinction in Beauvoir's concept of the body as situation: ‘For Beauvoir, a woman is someone with a female body from beginning to end, from the moment she is born until the moment she dies, but that body is her situation, not her destiny’ (1999:76). Moi argues for a context-dependent, historically located answer to Beauvoir's question.
Although Moi is not a sociologist, this contextually situated approach gives her a certain stake in the discipline. Feminist theory since the 1980s has followed a trajectory away from sociology and towards philosophy and cultural/literary studies in seeking its theoretical/conceptual frame (Barrett and Phillips, 1992; Smart, 1994). Moi was part of ‘the psychoanalytical turn’ in feminist literary studies, but she combined it with Bourdieu's sociology at a time at which his work had little circulation within feminism. She was responsible for introducing to feminist literary theorists some of the major organizing concepts of Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, arguing that his work was ripe for feminist ‘critique and appropriation’ (Moi, 1991).
Materialist feminism: do women constitute a social class?
Philosophical materialism is the view that all that exists is material or is wholly dependent upon matter for its existence … human beings … [are] … fundamentally bodily in nature. (Urmson and Rée, 1989:194, The Concise Encyclopaedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers.)
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, … but real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity… . Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. (Marx and Engels, 1965:31, The German Ideology.)
Beauvoir has many followers, particularly within the school of French materialist feminism: in France, Christine Delphy, Michèle Le Doeuff, Claudette Guillaumin and others, and in Britain, those feminists who have located themselves in relation to this school (Lisa Adkins, Stevi Jackson, Diana Leonard and others). Materialist feminism comes in diverse forms, and I shall follow Jackson in distinguishing those that emanated from the French school and that remained firmly located on the domain of ‘the social’ (Jackson, 2001) from those, very often emanating from philosophy, cultural, or literary studies: Rosemary Hennessy (1993), Donna Landry (Landry and MacClean, 1993) and others (see Hennessey and Ingraham, 1997) who have remained within the tradition of Marxist feminism in seeking some kind of synthesis of Marxist/socialist analysis with ‘the cultural turn’ associated with psychoanalysis and the poststructuralist theory of language, and who are therefore more influenced by the other major school of French feminism dominated by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva that was hostile towards Beauvoir (see Moi, 1987). French materialist feminism is distinctive in conceptualising sexual divisions and relationships as (antagonistic) class relationships in their own right in the Marxist sense. Materialist feminism in France originated with the group that was associated with the journal Questions féministes, (with which Beauvoir herself was associated). This materialist feminism represented a fusion of radical feminism with elements of Marxist feminism that in the process extended the meaning of ‘materialism’ beyond the primacy given within Marxism to the capitalist mode of production.
The early writings of Christine Delphy demonstrate the extent of that initial (highly critical) engagement. Delphy, like British Marxist feminists of the same period, located her materialism within the concept of the ‘production of material life’ and ‘the social relations of production and reproduction’. But the Marxian paradigm was problematic for Marxist and French feminist materialists alike in its relegation of human sexuality and reproduction to the realm of nature:
The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition of the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer's instinct of self-preservation and of propagation (Marx, 1970:572).
Engels' work became a critical resource for a Marxist theory of the social relations of reproduction (Sayers et al, 1987) but Engels wrote of the family rather than sexuality. Both materialist feminisms drew attention to the unpaid labour undertaken by women in the home. Both participated in the extended debate over domestic labour that had almost run its course by the beginning of the 1980s (Malos, 1980). Delphy resolved the problem of sexuality together with that of domestic labour by positing two parallel modes of production, the first pertaining to capitalism, the second to ‘family’, or ‘patriarchal production’, and by assimilating women's sexuality to the category of exploited labour. For Delphy then, the mode of production of 20th century Western society could not be described exclusively as capitalist. For only the first mode, she argued, is properly so described, centring as it does on the exploitation of labour to produce surplus value in commodity production. The unpaid domestic labour of women may have benefited capitalism but, Delphy argued, it was labour that was more immediately exploited by men rather than by the capitalist class. ‘The main enemy’ so far as women as a class were concerned, was patriarchy – a system of male power over women. 4
Delphy considered not the relationship of women to the capitalist means of production as the chief determinant of women's class position, but their position within exploitative relations of family production, whose linchpin was marriage: institutionalized compulsory heterosexuality:
Even though a marriage with a man from the capitalist class can raise a woman's standard of living, it does not make her a member of that class. She herself does not own the means of production. Therefore her standard of living does not depend on her class relationship to the proletariat; but on her serf relations of production with her husband (Delphy, 1984:71).
It was male-female sexual relations, especially marriage that tied women into unequal, servile relationships with men. However while heterosexuality presupposed biological sexual differences, biology did not found the unequal relations of men and women, nor define them as ‘classes’. For Delphy men and women are socially constituted groups structured around antagonistic gender class relations and interests.
In drawing attention to very significant aspects of the production of material life that took place outside the capitalist mode of production, French materialist feminism remained strictly materialist. But the designation of women as a full social class by virtue of their position within the social relations of family rather than capitalist production, structured by institutionalized heterosexuality, took them well beyond any semblance of Marxist orthodoxy. This was a step too far for many Marxist feminists, and the two materialisms separated with some acrimony (Barrett and McIntosh 1979; Delphy, 1984).
As is clear in this quote from Delphy, working-class women were presented as subject to a double exploitation of their labour through their participation in both modes of production. But bourgeois women were not considered to be full members of their prima facie social class.
Both the definitions at the head of this section emphasize the physical and bodily nature of ‘material life’. Marx and Engels do not separate off the physical, the embodied, from formative social activity: ‘The writing of history must always set out from these material bases and their modification in the course of history through the actions of men’ (Marx and Engels, 1965:31). French materialist feminists locate gender classes entirely within the realm of the social, a realm screened off from the biological. They have in the main relatively little to say about the specificity of women's biological bodies, in spite of their great debt to Beauvoir, who has much to say on this topic with which she opens her study of ‘woman's situation’. They were scrupulously social constructionist in their theories. The distinction between (biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender retained some circulation – Delphy continued to use the distinction although critically – but French materialist feminists were among the earliest to suggest that sex, too, and not just gender, was fully social; sexual difference could not be distinguished from gender on the grounds that one belonged to ‘nature’, the other to ‘culture’. In this move they anticipated in all but one respect the position taken in the 1990s by Judith Butler, who famously declared:
this construct called sex is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turned out to be no distinction at all (Butler, 1990:7).
The key remaining difference was that where Butler spoke of ‘cultural construction’ of sex and gender, the materialist feminists spoke of ‘social construction’. Butler, unlike the majority of the French (and associated British – see Jackson, 2001) materialist feminists, had taken ‘the cultural/linguistic turn’ with a vengeance, and unlike most of the school of French materialist feminism, also draws on psychoanalytic theory, a resource eschewed explicitly by Jackson, for example, along with ‘the cultural turn’ (Jackson, 1999).
Among those who brought the sexual entirely into the realm of the social was Monique Wittig. The social relationship that generated sexual difference, created hierarchical and oppressive classes with opposed interests, was (reproductive) heterosexuality, imposed on females whether they wished or no, to make of them an oppressed class, ‘women’. Wittig's answer to Beauvoir's question, in her writings from the 1970s, is very different to that of Moi. The meaning of ‘woman’ is brought into sharp focus for Wittig by the figure of the lesbian:
[T]he lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society (Wittig, 1992:13).
The practice of heterosexuality organizes and creates the (social) distinction between men and women:
The category of sex is the product of a heterosexual society in which men appropriate for themselves the reproduction and production of women, and also their physical persons by means of a contract called the marriage contract (Wittig, 1992:6).
The recurrent theme of sexuality and sexual reproduction as work is significant, as this redefinition as ‘work’ enabled the French materialists to take sex into the domain of the social, even in the case of biological reproduction (Tabet, 1996). Sexual and reproductive work has a product: the child. It is alienated labour however, for the product does not belong to its producer; indeed it is a species of ‘slave-labour’ because it is obligatory. 5
Incorporating heterosexual practice and human reproduction into the category of work may not generate an account of (hetero)sexuality with much nuance. It hardly allows acknowledgement of the deep investments that many women make in their reproductive bodies, in pregnancy, reproduction, children as that which was opened up by the engagement with psychoanalysis. But one very promising avenue was created with the shift from sex as work to sexual work – paid work that takes place within the frame of commodity exchange (Adkins, 1995; Adkins and Merchant, 1996; Pateman, 1988). It brought into the frame not only directly ‘sexual work’ such as prostitution, but also to the way that labour is gendered and sexualized within the economic division of labour. 6
Gender as status
Max Weber famously distinguished between class, status and party in his study of power in society. Sociological stratification theory, especially as developed in the US, tends to conflate class with status (Crompton et al, 2000; Goldthorpe, 1983; Savage, 2000). French materialist feminism in France and Britain, as it was developed in the 1970s and 1980s, placed the weight of emphasis as we have seen upon the production of ‘women’ as a gender class, one constituted through the social relations of domestic production, including sexuality, rather than upon the participation of women in the capitalist labour market.
As we have seen, the argument was that while working class women are full members of both the working class, and the subordinate gender class, ‘bourgeois’ women who do not have ‘bourgeois’ positions in the labour market are classed only through their gender, and they share their gender class, of course, with their working-class sisters. Delphy, however, acknowledges that their respective standards of living may be very different. I want to raise the question whether the differences that Delphy acknowledges here do not take us into the arena of ‘status power’ rather than class power, 7 forms of power that women have held over other women. For the wives and daughters of capitalists and the secretaries of powerful men may exercise status power, even though their status is relational and the power whose exercise it enables may be more precarious than that of their husbands or their bosses. If we make this move, we need to do so in full consciousness of the fact that this form of power is very real. We should not underestimate its capacity to inflict injury, as Bourdieu, and Iris MarionYoung, and Nancy Fraser all recognize (Bourdieu, 2001; Fraser, 1997, 1998; Young, 1990).
We might follow Young at this point, and speak of ‘social groups’, without differentiating status groups from class groups (Young, 1990). This lack of specificity allows her to raise the issue of forms of oppression that various subordinated groups are characteristically vulnerable to, including racialized groups, gender groupings, social classes, and others. These are of course cross cutting. We are all members of more than one social group. Fraser, in her exchanges with Young (Fraser, 1997; Young, 1997), and later with Butler (Butler, 1998; Fraser, 1998) emphasizes the distinction between status and class, using an explicitly Weberian frame. But ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural’ or the ‘status order’ that is structured by the dominant culture, are for Fraser analytical rather than substantive categories. She classifies groups according to whether they are structured primarily by the economic or the status order, although she recognizes, importantly, that some groups may be ‘bivalent’ and that, substantively, the two are closely imbricated, so that injustices that have their root, analytically, in one, may require ‘remedies’ in the other, or in both sets of power relations (Fraser and Honneth, 2003).
Gender as seriality
Under the broad head of ‘postmodernism’, Young, among others, has floated the idea of a different kind of political mobilization that may be contingent and shifting, formed for specific and limited purposes. She distinguishes between ‘groups’ and ‘series’, drawing on Sartre: ‘not all structured social action takes place in groups’ (Young, 1995, 198). Series are collectivities that are transient, amorphous, forming in the course of everyday life and habitual actions. The bus queue affords Sartre's example. Series, unlike groups such as social classes, do not need or usually intend to become, solidified. Young argues that gender may be understood profitably as seriality (Young, 1995). I do not have space in this chapter to give this concept and Young's argument the attention they deserve but I shall be returning to it subsequently. It is interesting that Juliet Mitchell also proposes a distinctive account of gender as seriality in her work on siblings (Mitchell, 2003).
In the next section I shall consider Bourdieu's account of gender in the social field, in terms of sex/genders as social groups, whether in terms of social class in the manner in which this is affirmed by French materialist feminism, or in terms of status.
Section 3. Bourdieu and the social field: ‘does gender fit?’
Bourdieu is often accused of base/superstruture reductionism, but this does not protect him from the opposite charge, that he has no adequate model of ‘the economic’ (Callinicos, 1999). But Bourdieu engages neither in economic reductionism nor in the elevation of everything into the realm of ‘the cultural’. Bourdieu's ‘social field’ is doubly articulated. The maps of social space that Bourdieu produces in Distinction are structured around two related hierarchies that measure, respectively, holdings of economic and of cultural capital and their composition in relation to the occupants of those positions. The positions themselves denote labour-market occupations. Women may be entered into this general field in terms of either their labour-market participation, or the status of the households to which they belong. Thus far Bourdieu is at one with Goldthorpe and the conventional view. For Goldthorpe, class position generates class-consciousness, class struggle and the creation of class institutions, class politics. Bourdieu does not disagree, but in his classic paper on social class, gives this basic model a rather different inflexion:
A ‘class’, be it social, sexual, ethnic or otherwise, exists when there are agents capable of imposing themselves as authorized to speak and to act officially in its place and in its name, upon whom, by recognizing themselves in these plenipotentiaries, by recognizing them as endowed with full power to speak and act in their name, recognize themselves as members of the class, and in doing so, confer upon it the only form of existence a group can possess (Bourdieu, 1987:15, emphasis added).
On this definition, there exist sexual classes, and sexual classes do indeed ‘cut directly through the conjugal family’ (Goldthorpe, 1983:469). For Bourdieu, social classes/groupings are constructed through successful bids for authorization by ‘agents capable of imposing themselves’ – in the case of the historical formation of the English working class, by the political societies and movements documented by E.P. Thompson (1963). They are not ‘pre-given’ in social space: rather positioning in social space may predispose an answering recognition and authorization by those addressed as the socio-political category in question (see Lovell, 2003). There are therefore no social classes or sexual classes per se – no classes ‘in themselves’ – until this process of representation and recognition has begun to occur. They are the outcome of political and cultural work:
Constructed classes theoretically assemble agents who, being subject to similar conditions, tend to resemble one another, and, as a result, are inclined to come together as a practical group (Bourdieu, 1987:6).
It follows firstly, that gender categories may be addressed (by ‘feminist plenipotentiaries?’) as distinct ‘social groups’, to become over time through this two-way process of authorization, ‘practical groups’. This process of group formation has occurred whenever women's movements have arisen. Bourdieu's definition is commensurable with the French materialist feminist claim that women constitute a social class, although for the latter, this class does indeed exist ‘in itself’ prior to its mobilization as a gender class. Bourdieu's proviso however is that such classes are made and not given. And French materialist feminism could no doubt be accommodated to this view, though there would be protest over the concept of ‘plenipotentiaries’. 8 Bourdieu considers that ‘the working class as we perceive it today … is a well-founded historical construction’ (Bourdieu, 1987:9). Can we say the same about the class (or ‘group’ – notice Bourdieu's equivocation between these two terms) of ‘women’?
There is an immediate problem in that women and men occupy very different positions in social space, depending on their socio-economic class, their marital status, ‘race’. ‘Objectively’, the sociologist may monitor and note the gendered characteristics of women and men, both in terms of their positioning within the labour market, their holdings of cultural capital, their gender-habitus, and so on. Interestingly, Bourdieu limits himself to this level of analysis by and large, in his book length study of masculine domination – to women as occupants of positions among the dominated in social space and as bearers of a feminine habitus that signifies subjection (Bourdieu, 2001). But their status as the dominated gender does not cluster them together within his map of social space. We might usefully compare women with Bourdieu's category of ‘cultural producers’, those whose holdings of cultural capital are high. In terms of class hierarchies, he refers to them as ‘the dominated fraction of the dominant class’. Cultural producers, however, have their own dedicated position within social space, as a differentiated sub-field of power (Bourdieu, 1993). But because gender, and gender-hierarchies of domination occur at every level of the general social field, we cannot speak as readily of ‘the dominated gender of the dominant class’. There is no sub-field of gender: of gender-domination, gender power.
Bourdieu touches only in passing the forms of mobilization, or ‘gender class formation’, achieved through feminism and the various women's movements. Most of his book documents instead the characteristic forms of symbolic violence that women suffer. He characterizes features of ‘the feminine habitus’ 9 and documents the effects that this habitus trails in the lives of women, including feminists, who are trying to escape from or ameliorate this form of domination. 10
Bourdieu is reserved at best about the status of feminism and the women's movement. Possibly he considers, perhaps with good reason, that the ‘class’ or status group of women would have to be understood to be but weakly founded, unlike the English working class that provides his paradigm case. If the ‘classing’ of women as a gender group rests upon the work of creating recognized plenipotentiaries or representatives, in Bourdieu's terms, then there is little in Bourdieu to suggest that he considers that this work of representation has been taken very far as yet.
Bourdieu has little to say about feminism as a political movement, then, but quite a lot to say about the positioning of women in social space, in relation both to the labour market (used as an indicator of holdings of economic capital), and of the ‘economy of symbolic goods’ (cultural and symbolic capital). Leslie McCall (1992) discusses the reservation that many feminists have expressed concerning Bourdieu, in particular, that he perceives gender to be only secondary as a structuring principle of the social field. She offers an interesting reading of this: that gender is ‘hidden’, ‘unofficial’, ‘real’. On this reading its ‘secondary’ status does not diminish and possibly even enhances its significance. It is dispersed across the social field, but its organizing principle is pervasive and, as Bourdieu insists, naturalized, doxic, and deeply structuring.
It is important to note that Bourdieu is at least as close to Max Weber as he is to Marx in his account of the double articulation of social space. The economy of symbolic goods is a field of power relations. Position holders, whether individuals, families, or other joint units, struggle to increase their overall holdings of cultural and symbolic capital, and high holdings enable the exercise of power over those with less, as well as resources to provide some defence, however circumscribed, against domination, against symbolic violation. ‘Culture’, in other words, is not superstructural, but is a resource in power relationships, power struggles that are specific to this particular ‘economy’. Bourdieu's whole discussion of women and men as ‘gender classes’ focuses on the economy of symbolic goods, and this would suggest that he sees genders as status groups rather than as classes. However the two ‘economies’ are connected, as they were for Max Weber. In the economy of symbolic goods, women play a critical role. Bourdieu follows Lévi-Strauss in identifying women as bearers in their persons of embodied cultural capital, prizes that circulate in the exchanges of the marriage market, and therefore cultural objects, but also sees them as key functionaries and agents in the capital holding strategies of families, kin, ethnic group, etc, as regards cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and it is here that his work on women and gender is most interesting.
Bourdieu makes some cautious comments on the political struggle for sex equality towards the close of his study of masculine domination, and these reveal, perhaps, why Bourdieu is so reserved about feminism and women's movements:
[T]hese struggles are liable to reinforce the effects of another form of fictitious universalism, by favouring firstly women drawn from the same regions of social space as the men who currently occupy the dominant positions (Bourdieu, 2001:117, emphasis added).
Bridget Fowler spells out what is implied here in a series of cautionary ‘what ifs’:
What if we have become so mesmerized by stories of women's progress or its limits that we fail to notice the increasing polarization of class inequalities going on behind our backs, and the indirect contribution of women's work to this, through the combining of high salaries at the service class level? (Fowler, 2003:482).
Fowler views the evidence that the women's movement and feminism may have accrued ‘profits’ not only to those women best positioned to reap the benefits, but also for the dominant class as a whole, viz-a-viz their relationship to the dominated socio-economic class. Inequalities of social class have deepened and widened. The view that the ‘advance’ of women has been the advance of women of the dominant class and of the class to which they belong, and that it has been achieved at the expense of the working class as a whole, but especially working class men, is one that is being voiced with increasing frequency (Coward, 1999). And Fowler also draws attention to the uncomfortable facts of female-female domination across the lines of class, drawing here on the work of Bridget Anderson (2000) on the new class of female domestic labourers (see also Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003).
‘Materialism’ always carries the danger of representing the power that is rooted in economic relations as somehow ‘more real’ than symbolic power. But if Bourdieu establishes anything it is the deep power of symbolic violence to inflict harm, pain, injury. For Bourdieu, there is a close relationship, though not one of dependency, between economic power and symbolic power, although it is true that he does not place them face to face on a level playing field so to speak, in his ‘social field’: there are hierarchical relationships from left to right 11 on Bourdieu's map of social space (Honneth, 1986) – with the holders of economic capital identified as ‘the dominant fraction of the dominant class’, and holders of cultural capital as ‘the dominated fraction of the dominant class’. But symbolic violence, the currency that circulates in the economy of symbolic goods, structures relationships of domination. It is important to remember this when rehearsing the manner in which changes that have altered the balance of power in relation to gender in that other (dominant) economy, mainly through the enhanced access of women to the labour market, may have increased the inequities that structure social class relationships in social space, when class is reckoned in terms of household or family, rather than individual holdings of economic capital.
We should not lose sight of the symbolic violence – leaving aside the physical violence whose toll in suffering and deprivation in the lives of women shows no sign of abating – that is inflicted on women by virtue of their sexed identity. While the slogan of ‘sisterhood’ notoriously papered over the differences that separate women from one another, there are still striking examples (as Bourdieu himself argues in his study of masculine domination) of similarities across great differences of class, space and history. I want to end by placing side by side two testimonies that may be read in terms of these similarities in the strategies used by the dominant and by the dominated ‘gender classes’, one from a middle-aged contract worker in the Colombian flower industry towards the close of the 20th century whose father was a peasant share-cropper, the other an older professional woman whose father was a successful small businessman, each speaking of their childhood experiences:
Amaranta's testimony
My father used to say ‘even if we have our clothes stitched in pieces, even if we don't have two pairs of shoes, the important thing in life is to eat well’, and he didn't give us clothes or was concerned about us studying, nothing like that, everything he got was to be spent on food. My mother used to sell our food to buy us clothes and school books, and everything to study. It was funny because he didn't realise how she managed to get all these things for us. She used to take little by little from the bean and maize sacks until she had her own sack and then she would give it to sell in the market in somebody else's name (Madrid, 2003:143).
Ann's testimony
My father had many close friends in Germany, and after WWII he wished to help them. But clothing was rationed and required coupons. My mother, with eight children at that time, was entirely dependent on my father to feed and clothe all of us. He greatly relished his food, and as a result, we never wanted in this respect. But there was never enough money for new clothes. As the fifth child, and the third in a series of 5 girls, hand-me-downs were the norm. Rich in clothing coupons she could not afford to use, my mother sold them to my father, telling him they had been acquired on the black market. So he unwittingly bought his own children's clothing coupons, enabling my mother to replenish our meagre collective stock (Personal communication).
While access to the labour market, or to the ‘public patriarchy’ of the welfare state, would have given these two women additional resources for resistance in their struggle against gender domination, differences of class would channel the forms of employment open to them, leaving, still, a gulf between them. But across vast differences of class, ‘race’ and ethnicity, time, geographical location, culture and language then, there are striking similarities in these two stories: in the exercise of domestic patriarchal power, and of maternal resistance using the weapons of stealth and subterfuge. Bourdieu recognizes the weapons that women use to fight their corner and to get some little room for manoeuvre, but he cites the familiar saw that ‘the weapons of the weak are weak weapons’ (Bourdieu, 2001:32). Indeed they are, if we are willing to count only the power of radical transformation. But they were powerful enough in both cases to ensure that these mothers' daughters had access to some small, basic share of ‘cultural capital’. It remains true nevertheless that to relieve this form of gender domination may have unintended consequences from the point of view of social class inequalities.
Conclusion
In conclusion I want to draw attention to a problem that troubles me. Whether conceptualized as class, status group, or series, the analyses offered by all of the social constructionist feminists, and by sociologists such as Bourdieu, run into difficulties insofar as they do not include in the equation the sharp sexual division of labour in human reproduction. Moi comes closest to opening up the space for this, but she scarcely touches on this issue. And while I agree with her that biological differences between the sexes do not have any necessary and relentless consequences, no categorical imperatives for the way in which social relations and institutions are organized, I would want to make the point the other way round: the manner in which we organize those institutions and social relations has powerful effects upon the situation of many women. It follows that the feminist project ignores sexual difference and the social relations of reproduction at its peril. If women constitute a class, it is a class differentiated not only along the lines of ‘race’, socio-economic class, sexuality – the three ‘differences’ that are most commonly recognized – but also differentiated by those who become, willy nilly or by choice, the mothers of children and those that do not.
Attention to the level of ‘biological exigencies’ is critical, then, for an effective feminist politics and scholarship, and I do not find much evidence of this attention within the militantly social constructionist approaches which have formed my own thinking and with which I have great sympathy. Taking these social relations into account, the analyses offered here might have to change. For example, the concept of ‘gender as seriality’, at least as developed by Young (1995) does not seem to account for the phenomenon noted earlier by Young herself, the ‘thrown-ness’ of social groups, (a concept borrowed from Heidegger) and the identities they carry (Young, 1990:46). We are ‘thrown’ by our sexed bodies into our gender identity. Anyone with a female body, as Moi insists, following Beauvoir, is a woman ‘from the moment she is born until the moment she dies’. Our female bodies are our ‘situation’. Whether we are ‘called’ into gendered identities/politics through being constituted as groups or on the basis of transient seriality, only women can be ‘called’ as women. But women may become part of a gender-series or status group on a differential basis: mothers, ‘childfree’, professional women, unpaid carers, intellectual women, etc. Pace the concerns of materialist feminism, and of Bourdieu, it probably remains true that the impulse behind the WLM was broader than these more limited forms of mobilization, therefore more akin to class mobilization. Short of this, whether we opt for a ‘politics of recognition’ or a ‘politics of redistribution’, we shall be obliged to weigh very carefully the consequences of any transformations in either the economic order or the status/cultural order in terms of the differential effects such transformations may have for different categories of
women. 12
To re-centre the discussion on the social relations of reproduction is to introduce an actor that has been described by John O'Neill as an implausible candidate for the status of ‘the individual’: the child (O'Neill 1994). O'Neil is passionate in his commitment to ‘the civic commons’, to a ‘thick’ form of sociality. But his discussions of women and feminism illustrate only too well the problem of more collective subjectivities, from which this paper started.
Footnotes
1
Mike 
has argues that the individual, and the individualization thesis do not have to be specified in a manner which makes the concept of social class redundant, but rather that social class has its effects through individuals and individualization. In this he is in important part influenced by Bourdieu.
2
Giddens centres the quest, dating as far back as the idea of romantic love, for ‘the pure relationship’. It is interesting to compare this concept with Bourdieu's footnote encomium to love in Masculine Domination (2002:109–112). I added a somewhat caustic footnote on this to my 2000 paper, and must remain sceptical in the face of Fowler's claim of great significance for this encomium, on the grounds that it provides an alternative to the systematic and relentless presentation of social relations in terms of hierarchy and domination, of which he is often accused.
3
Savage, one of the editors of the Crompton et al collection, articulates elsewhere a position that attempts to keep together in the same frame both class analysis and ‘the cultural’ (Savage, 2000).
4
It is interesting that the radical political lesbian slogan ‘sleeping with the enemy’, was taken as the title for a popular film starring Julia Roberts in 1991. In a forthright and contentious attack on heterosexual feminists, this was one accusation that was levied at them (Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, 1981). Heterosexual feminists were in effect, (gender)-class traitors.
5
The figure of the handmaid in Margaret Attwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, might stand as exemplar for the position of the heterosexual woman engaged in heterosexual exchanges in the account offered by Wittig.
6
The literature on ‘body-work’ is by now extensive, and is informed by other approaches: by Foucault and by poststructuralist theories of the body. But French and associated materialist feminism made a distinctive contribution to this line of analysis that still informs this whole enterprise, often in conjunction with other approaches.
7
Interestingly, Delphy speaks of women as a caste, which for Weber was a status rather than a class category.
8
The WLM had a different concept of ‘leadership’ and this is perhaps best expressed by Beyond the Fragments (Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright, 1979).
9
Often it must be said in terms that will be very familiar to those who have worked over a longer span of time in this field.
10
The habitus encompasses embodied femininity, and there has been some discussion among feminists using Bourdieu as to whether femininity ought to be counted as a form of ‘cultural capital’. Moi (1999) thinks that sexual status should and does count in the struggles within the economy of symbolic goods and within labour-market struggles, but it usually counts as negative cultural capital. Skeggs understands femininity to be ‘cultural capital’, something that may be cultivated to yield certain ‘profits’, but in a manner that is deeply problematic for its holders (Skeggs, 1997).
11
In Bourdieu's work on cultural production (1993) these are transposed, so that ‘economic capital’ is on the right, cultural capital on the left.
12
Fraser's ‘thought experiment’ using Weberian ideal types, comprises a systematic consideration of a whole range of political strategies that feminists need to consider ‘after the family wage’. One of her principles is that, at least when we are considering this matter in principle rather than pragmatically, we need to identify strategies that do not involve trading off one gain for a loss or compromise elsewhere (Fraser, 1997).