Deconstructing Masculinity Masculine Domination. By Pierre Bourdieu, Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Reviewed by Brigid Rooney. 'Every parent knows girls are outperforming boys at school. But while educators argue about what to do, boys continue to suffer.' (Richard Yallop, 'The trouble with boys', Weekend Australian, June 16-17, 2001: 19) My response to a recent report on boys' education in the Australian coincides to some degree with reading Pierre Bourdieu's Masculine Domination. Although as a feminist I entertain suspicions about the rhetoric and intentions of the boys' education lobby in Australia, as a mother of school-aged boys I believe that current constructions of masculinity remain oppressive rather than enabling for boys. Feminists are no doubt right to resist pressures to shift scarce educational resources towards boys' education. What, after all, will girls gain from such a shift? They certainly have a lot to lose. As well as tending to rehearse white middle-class values and concerns, the issue of boys' education can appear as another instance of backlash against recent feminist redress of gender inequality in education. Furthermore, some well-known advocates of boys' education have given a very conservative spin to debate. Awareness of the social constructedness of genders and sexualities, however – awareness of the kind promoted by Bourdieu's book – may challenge and enrich feminist thinking. What measures, especially at institutional levels, might help reduce men's violence towards women? Even though some form of gender binarism may always be with us, is there not room to create alternative identities for future generations of men and women? Reading Masculine Domination engenders both pessimism and optimism about whether solutions can be found for such problems that, for Bourdieu, spring from the persistence and durability of the gendering of thought, subjectivity and the social world. If I am pessimistic that my sons can ever be truly free of the effects of masculine domination it is because I find myself agreeing reluctantly that, despite its impressive achievements, feminism has to date made only superficial inroads on gender inequality. For Bourdieu, the deepest structures of a fundamentally gendered binarism are inscribed on bodies and in minds and are continually reproduced in ways difficult either to recognize or to contest. If I glean any comfort from reading Masculine Domination it is somewhere in the very effort of feminists and, indeed, in Bourdieu's own effort to remain vigilant about and vocally critical of the most persistent, personal and subtle of gendering processes. Bourdieu argues that recognition of the conditions (and feminism becomes crucial leverage here) must be a critical step in the change process. Masculine Domination (translated by Richard Nice) gives English-speaking readers their first opportunity to engage directly with Bourdieu's extended meditation on gender and power, first published in 1998 as La domination masculine (Editions de Seuil). Although Bourdieu has previously been criticized for inadequate attention to gender in the context of his otherwise groundbreaking sociological analyses of Kabylian and French cultures, feminists have shown increasing interest in applying his work. Among others Toril Moi and Bridget Fowler (New Literary History 22, 1991; Iron Bulletin 25/26, 2000) have highlighted how Bourdieu's systematic microtheory of power can enrich and renew materialist approaches that have been somewhat lacking in feminist discourse after Foucault. Although not particularly lengthy (just 133 pages in the Polity Press edition), Masculine Domination proves neither simple nor quick to read. Readers encountering Bourdieu for the first time may find aspects of Masculine Domination rather opaque since its underpinning conceptual framework is implicit rather than fully or systematically elaborated. In some ways this is not an unusual strategy for Bourdieu who continually develops and adjusts his framework in the context of each successive study. Most directly relevant to Masculine Domination are Bourdieu's studies of the Kabyle (especially The Logic of Practice), and of contemporary French culture (especially Distinction). Some understanding of the specifics of Bourdieu's deployment of terms like 'field', 'capital', 'habitus' and 'bodily hexis' would assist the reader of Masculine Domination to make full sense of its constant movement between the naturalized structures that create and oppress, and the seemingly free and natural choices of individuals that are informed by those structures and that also reproduce them. Bourdieu's specific contribution to feminist theory in Masculine Domination is his focus on how gendered domination becomes an embodied and seemingly natural thing: Whereas the idea that the social definition of the body, and especially of the sexual organs, is the product of a social labour of construction has become quite banal through having been advocated by the whole anthropological tradition, the mechanism of the inversion of cause and effect that I am trying to describe here, through which the naturalization of that construction takes place, has not, it seems to me, been fully described (22). Bourdieu's main aim is to denaturalize the naturalized 'mechanism' of the construction of gender. This mechanism achieves a 'somatization of the social relations of domination' (23). Bodies are imprinted by a collective history - a history which, embodied in this way, vanishes under the sign of nature; male bodies are masculinised and female bodies feminised in an interminable re-materialisation of gender binarism. In a manoeuvre calculated in part, one suspects, to address and to outflank Judith Butler's work, Bourdieu requires recognition that this mechanism has also already gendered the knowledges that construct the very notion of 'biological bodies' (3). That Bourdieu seeks to distinguish his model of the reproduction of gender relations from Butler's model of the performative is very clear when he claims that the 'work of symbolic construction is far more than a strictly performative operation of naming'. Instead, he emphasizes the 'formidable collective labour of diffuse and continuous socialization' as the context within which a process of 'practical construction' of minds and bodies takes place (23). Masculine Domination proceeds through three chapters. In what has become a signature approach, Bourdieu prepares the ground by focusing on his Kabylian findings, creating a lens for subsequent analyses of contemporary French and American societies. As Jeremy Lane's recent study (amongst other work) has shown, Bourdieu's otherwise powerful deployment of the Kabyle can be seen as inherently contentious. Juxtaposing a 'premodern' Kabylian culture with modern Western cultures is Bourdieu's way of foregrounding and denaturalising comparable structures of gender that may be less visible in the familiar, taken-for-granted, modern world of the implied reader. But this strategy of putting the Kabyle to work for the West's illumination may well feminize the Kabyle's relation to contemporary Western society, reproducing a gendered and colonial system of knowing. Despite this important problem, I think there is much of value in Bourdieu's book, and in its approach to unveiling the permanence of gendered structures in contemporary Western societies. Of particular interest is his reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in which he traces the narrative's deep apprehension of the blindness of masculine domination, and its 'incomparably lucid evocation of the female gaze' (69), figured in the relation between Mr and Mrs Ramsay. Interestingly, but somewhat problematically, Bourdieu finds Woolf's novel much more amenable to his sociology than her much quoted theoretical and polemical feminist texts, arguing that the 'anamnesis favoured by the work of writing' the novel allows for a lucidity that exceeds the usual clichés. The choice of Woolf's novel over her theoretical texts does mirror a problem that Bourdieu does not, and perhaps cannot, entirely resolve. The difficulty resides in how he responds to the vast body of feminist research and knowledge available to him. Judith Butler is the only major contemporary feminist theorist he takes on explicitly, and his use of her work is sidelong and quite ambivalent, perhaps bespeaking a dangerous proximity. (That Butler herself recognises this proximity is evident in her recent astute questioning of the distinction Bourdieu asserts between a discursive model of the performative and his own materialist model of the habitus, in 'Performativity's Social Magic', in Richard Shusterman's Bourdieu Reader 126). In a revealing aside, Bourdieu remarks that his avoidance of current theoretically-oriented feminist discourses is deliberate. 'I cannot avoid seeing an effect of submission to the dominant models', he says, referring obliquely to the work of major feminist theorists in France and in the USA. His preferred recourse is to empirically-oriented disciplinary studies conducted by feminist scholars on specific questions. These, he believes, are 'less in conformity with the - typically masculine - idea of 'grand theory'' (98; fn31). While this is fairly consistent with Bourdieu's position in relation to contemporary male theorists, it does not prevent an apparent repetition of a gendered and hierarchical devaluing of significant feminist research and theory. The rich complexity of major feminist discourses and debates requires greater acknowledgement and engagement than Bourdieu is inclined to give, and this detracts from the power of his own intervention. Yet, in my view Masculine Domination represents, at the very least, that rare and fascinating phenomenon: a serious attempt by an eminent male theorist to engage with issues of gender. It is illuminating and articulate about the oppressive structures of domination that construct and constrain both men and women. While Bourdieu's book raises many further questions for feminist readers, I do find compelling its argument that the 'visible changes that have affected the condition of women mask the permanence of the invisible structures, which can only be brought to light by relational thinking'(106). For all its limitations, Bourdieu's framework is well attuned to the task of grasping and challenging what otherwise appear to be remarkably enduring relations of symbolic domination. Brigid Rooney is a postgraduate fellow in the English Department at the University of Sydney.