Sociology Homework assignment

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authority.'38 It can be understood that from this point of view, which links sexuality and power, the worst humiliation for a man is to be turned into a woman; and one might evoke here the testimonies of men who, as a result of torture deliberately designed to feminize them, particularly through sexual humilia­ tion, jokes about their virility, accusations of homosexuality, etc., or simply the need to behave as if they were women, have come to discover 'what it means to be constantly aware of one's body, always exposed to humiliation or ridicule, and to find comfort in household tasks or chatting with friends' .39

The embodhnent of domination

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 mechan­ ism of the inversion of cause and effect that I am trying to describe here, through which the naturalization of that con­ struction takes place, has not, it seems to me, been fully described. For the paradox is that it is the visible differences between the female body and the male body which, being per­ ceived and constructed according to the practical schemes of the androcentric worldview, become the most perfectly indis­ putable guarantee of meanings and values that are in harmony with the principles of that worldview: it is not the phallus (or its absence) which is the basis of that worldview, rather it is that worldview which, being organized according to the divi­ sion into relational genders, male and female, can institute the phallus, constituted as the symbol of virility, of the specifically male point of honour (nif), and the difference between biologi­

38 1. Boswell, 'Sexual and ethical categories in premodern Europe', in P. McWhirter, S. Sanders and 1. Reinisch (eds), HomosexualitylHeterosexual­ ity: Concepts of Sexual Orientation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.17. 39 C£ 1. Franco, 'Gender, death and resistance: facing the ethical vacuum', in 1. E. Corradi, P. Weiss Fagen and M. A. Garreton (eds), Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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cal bodies as objective foundations of the difference between the sexes, in the sense of genders constructed as two hierar­ chized social essences. Far from the necessities of biological reproduction determining the symbolic organization of the sexual division of labour and, ultimately, of the whole natural and social order, it is an arbitrary construction of the male and female body, of its uses and functions, especially in biological reproduction, which gives an apparently natural foundation to the androcentric view of the division of sexual labour and the sexual division of labour and so of the whole cosmos. The par­ ticular strength of the masculine sociodicy comes from the fact that it combines and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction.

The work of symbolic construction is far more than a strictly perfonnative operation of naming which orients and structures representations, starting with representations of the body (which is itself not negligible); it is brought about and culminates in a profound and durable transformation of bodies (and minds), that is to say, in and through a process of practical construction imposing a differentiated definition of the legitimate uses of the body, in particular sexual ones, which tends to exclude from the universe of the feasible and thinkable everything that marks membership of the other gender - and in particular all the potentialities biologically implied in the 'polymorphous per­ versity', as Freud puts it, of every infant - to produce the social artefact of the manly man or the womanly woman. The arbi­ trary nomos which institutes the two classes in objectivity takes on the appearance of a law of nature (people often speak of a sexuality or, even today, a marriage that is 'against nature') only at the end of a somatization of the social relations of domination: it is only after a formidable collective labour of diffuse and continuous socialization that the distinctive identities insti­ tuted by the cultural arbitrary are embodied in habitus that are clearly differentiated according to the dominant principle of division and capable of perceiving the world according to this principle.

Existing only relationaUy, each of the two genders is the product of the labour of diacritical construction, both theoreti­ cal and practical, which is necessary in order to produce it as

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a body sociaUy differentiated from the opposite gender (in all the culturally pertinent respects), i.e. as a male, and therefore non­ female, habitus or as a female and therefore non-male habitus. The formative process, Bildung, in the full sense, which brings about this social construction of the body only very partially takes the form of explicit and express pedagogic action. It is to a large extent the automatic, agentless effect of a physical and social order entirely organized in accordance with the andro­ centric principle (which explains the extreme strength of its hold). Inscribed in the things of the world, the masculine order also inscribes itself in bodies through the tacit injunctions that are implied in the routines of the division of labour or of col­ lective or private rituals (consider, for example, the avoidance behaviours imposed on women by their exclusion from male spaces). The regularities of the physical order and the social order impose and inculcate dispositions by excluding women from the noblest tasks Oeading the plough, for example), by designating inferior places for them (the edge of the road or embankment, for example), by teaching them how to hold their bodies (for example, bent, with arms folded on the chest, before respectable men), by assigning them menial and drudging tasks (they transport dung, and when olives are harvested, they and the children pick them up from the ground while the men wield the pole to knock them down), and, more generally, by taking advantage, in accordance with the fundamental presup­ positions, of biological differences, which thus appear to be at the basis of social differences.

In the long sequence of silent calls to order, rites of institu­ tion occupy a place apart, by virtue of their solemn and extra­ ordinary character: they aim to set up, in the name of the whole assembled community, a sacralizing separation not only, as is suggested by the notion of the rite of passage, between those who have already received the distinctive mark and those who have not yet received it, because they are too young, but also and more importantly between those who are socially worthy to receive it and those who are forever excluded from it, in other words the women;40 or, as in the case of circumcision, the rite

40 To the contribution which rites of institution make to the instituting of manliness in male bodies should be added all children's games, especially

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of institution of masculinity par excellence, between those whose manliness it consecrates and those who cannot undergo the initiation and who cannot fail to see themselves as lacking what constitutes the occasion and the matter of the ritual of confirmation of manliness.

Thus, what the mythic discourse professes in an ultimately rather naive way is enacted by rites of institution in a more insidious and symbolically no doubt more effective way; and these rites take their places in the series of operations of differ­ entiation aimed at accentuating in each man or woman the external signs most immediately corresponding to the social definition of his or her sexual distinction or encouraging the practices appropriate to his or her sex while forbidding or dis­ couraging inappropriate behaviours, especially in relations with the opposite sex. This is the case, for example, of the so-called rites of 'separation', which aim to emancipate the boy from his mother and to ensure his gradual masculinization by encour­ aging and preparing him to confront the external world. Anthropological inquiry reveals that the psychological work which, according to one psychoanalytical tradition,41 boys must perform in order to break free of their quasi-symbiosis with their mother and to assert their own sexuality, is expressly and explicitly accompanied and even organized by the group, which, in the whole series of sexual rites of institution oriented towards virilization and, more generally, . in all the differentiated and differentiating practices of ordinary existence (manly sports and games, hunting, etc.), encourages

those which have a more or less obvious sexual connotation (such as the contest to urinate as far as possible, or the homosexual games of shepherd boys) and which, in their apparent inSignificance, are highly charged with ethical connotations, often inscribed in language (for example, in Bearnais, picheprim, 'short-piss', means ungenerous, miserly). On the reasons which led me to substitute the notion of rite of institution (a term that should be under­ stood in the sense both of what is instituted - the institution of marriage ­ and the act of instituting - the instituting of the heir) for the notion of rite of passage, which probably owed its immediate success to the fact that it is simply a prenotion of common sense converted into a scientific-looking concept; see P. Bourdieu, 'Les rites d'institution' (in Ce que parler veut dire (Paris: Fayard, 1982), pp. 121-34). 41 Cf. in particular N. 1. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psycho­ analysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

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the break with the maternal world, from which girls (and also, to their misfortune, the 'sons of the widow') are exempted ­ which enables them to live in a kind of continuity with their mothers. 42

The objective 'intention' of denying the female part of the male (the very one which Melanie Klein asked psychoanalysis to recover, through an opposite operation to that performed by ritual), of sever­ ing attachments to the mother, the earth, the moist, night, nature, is manifested for example in the rites performed at the moment called 'the separation in ennayer' (el aazla gennayer) , such as boys' first haircut, and in all the ceremonies which mark the crossing of the threshold of the male world and which culminate in circumcision. Countless acts aim to separate the boy from his mother - using objects made with fire and tending to symbolize cutting (and male sexuality): knife, dagger, ploughshare, etc. For example, a newborn boy is placed on the right-hand (male) side of his mother, who herself lies on her right side, and between them are placed typically male objects such as a carding comb, a large knife, a ploughshare, one of the hearth­ stones. Likewise, the importance of the first haircut is linked to the fact that the hair, female in nature, is one of the symbolic links that bind the boy to the maternal world. It falls to the father to perform this inaugural cut, with a razor, a male implement, on the day of the 'separation in ennayer', shortly before the boy's first visit to the market, Le. at an age between six and ten. And the entry into the market - the boy's introduction to the world of men, the point of honour and symbolic struggles - continues the work of virilization (or deferninization): dressed in new clothes and wearing a silk belt in his hair, he is given a dagger, a padlock and a mirror, while his mother places a fresh egg in the cape of his burnous. At the gate of the market he breaks the egg and opens the padlock - manly acts of defloration

and looks at himself in the mirror, which, like the threshold, is an operator of reversal. His father guides him into the market, an exclu­ sively male world, and introduces him to the other men. On the way back, they buy an ox's head, a phallic symbol- on account of its horns

associated with nif.

42 As opposed to those who are sometimes called in Kabylia 'the sons of men', whose upbringing falls to several men, the 'sons of the widow' are suspected of haVing missed out on the unremitting labour that is needed to prevent boys from becoming women and of having been abandoned to the feminizing action of their mothers.

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The same psychosomatic work which, when applied to boys, aims to virilize them by stripping them of everything female which may remain in them - as it does in the 'sons of the widow' - takes a more radical form when applied to girls. Because woman is constituted as a negative entity, defined only by default, even her virtues can only be affirmed by a double negation, as vice denied or overcome, or as lesser evils. All the work of socialization therefore tends to impose limits on her, which all concern the body, thus defined as sacred, h'aram, and which have to be inscribed in the dispositions of the body. So the young Kabyle woman internalized the fundamental princi­ ples of the female 'art of living', of proper demeanour and deportment, inseparably corporeal and moral, by learning how to put on and wear the different clothing corresponding to her successive stages of life - little girl, nubile maiden, wife, mother - and insensibly acquiring, as much by unconscious mimicry as by express obedience, the right way to tie her belt or her hair; to move or keep still this or that part of her body when walking, to present her face and tum her eyes.

This apprenticeship is all the more effective because it remains essentially tacit: femininity is imposed for the most part through an unremitting discipline that concerns every part of the body and is continuously recalled through the constraints of clothing or hairstyle. The antagonistic principles of male and female identity are thus laid down in the form of permanent stances, gaits and postures which are the realization, or rather, the naturalization of an ethic. Just as the ethic of male honour can be summed up in a word, endlessly repeated by informants, qabel, to face, face up to, and in the upright posture (our military 'attention'), the visible sign of rectitude, which it designates,43 so female submissiveness seems to find a natural translation in bending, stooping, lowering oneself, 'submitting' - curved and supple postures and the associated docility being seen as appropriate to women. Early upbringing tends to inculcate ways of bearing the body, or various parts of it, the male right hand and the female left hand, ways of walking,

43 On the word qabel, itself linked to the most fundamental orientations of space and of the whole worldview, c£ P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 90.

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holding the head or directing the gaze, directly in the eyes or at one's feet, etc., which are charged with an ethic, a politics and a cosmology. (Our whole ethics, not to mention our aes­ thetics, is contained in the system of cardinal adjectives highllow, straight/twisted, rigid/supple, open/closed, etc., a good proportion of which also designate positions or dis­ positions of the body or some part of it, e.g. 'head held high', 'eyes downcast'.)

The submissive demeanour which is imposed on Kabyle women is the limiting case of what is still imposed on women, even today, as much in the United States as in Europe, and which, as a number of observers have shown, is summed up in a few imperatives: smile, look down, accept interruptions, etc. Nancy M. Henley has shown how women are taught to occupy space, to walk, to adopt appropriate postures. Using a method called 'memory work', which aims to evoke stories of childhood, discussed and interpreted collectively, Frigga Haug has also tried to bring to light the feelings linked to various parts of the body - the back which has to be kept straight, the stomach which has to be held in, the legs which must be kept together, etc., all postures which are charged with moral significance (it is vulgar to sit with the legs apart, a large stomach indicates lack of willpower, etc.).44 As if femininity were measured by the art of 'shrinking' (in Berber the feminine is marked by the diminutive form), women are held in a kind of invisible enclosure (of which the veil is only the visible manifestation) circumscribing the space allowed for the movements and postures of their bodies (whereas men occupy more space, espe­ cially in public places). This symbolic confinement is secured practi­ cally by their clothing which (as was even more visible in former times) has the effect not only of masking the body but of continu­ ously calling it to order (the skirt fulfils a function entirely analogous to that of the priest's cassock) without ever needing to prescribe or proscribe anything explicitly ('my mother never told me not to sit with my legs apart') - either because it constrains movement in

44 F. Haug et al., Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory (London: Verso, 1987). Although the authors do not seem to be aware of it, this inculcation of the submission of the body, which encounters the complicity of women, despite the constraint it imposes on them, is strongly marked socially, and the embodiment of femininity is inseparable from an embodiment of distinction, or, to put it another way, from contempt for the vulgarity associated with plunging necklines, too-short mini-skirts and too-heavy make-up (although this is generally perceived as very 'feminine' ...).

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various ways, like high heels or the bag which constantly encumbers the hands, and above all the skirt which prevents or hinders certain activities (running, various ways of sitting, etc.), or because it allows them only at the cost of constant precautions, as with young women who constantly pull at a too-short skirt, use their forearms to cover a plunging neckline or have to perform acrobatics to pick up an object while keeping their legs together. 45 These ways of bearing the body, which are very deeply associated with the moral restraint and the demureness that are appropriate for women, continue to impose themselves unconsciously on women even when they cease to be imposed by clothing (like the small, quick steps of some young women wearing trousers and flat heels). And the relaxed poses and postures, such as leaning back on two legs of a chair or putting the feet on a desk, which some men - especially those of high status - sometimes allow themselves as a sign of power or, which amounts to the same thing, of self-assurance, are literally unthinkable for women. 46

To those who may object that many women have now broken with the traditional norms and forms of restraint and who see the scope now available for the controlled exhibition of the body as an index of 'liberation', it only has to be pointed out that this use of the body remains very obviously subordinated to the male point of view (as is clearly seen in the use made of women's bodies in advertising, even today, in France, after half a century of feminism). The female body at once offered and refused manifests the symbolic availability which, as a number of feminist works have shown, is incumbent upon women, the combination of a power of attraction and seduction that is known and recognized by all, both men and women, and tending to honour the men on whom they depend or to

45 C£ Henley, Body Politics, pp. 38, 89-91, and also pp. 142-4, the reproduction of a cartoon with the caption 'Exercises for men', shOWing the 'absurdity of the postures' expected of women. 46 Everything that remains in the implicit state in the ordinary learning of femininity is made explicit in finishing schools with their courses in deport­ ment and entertaining, in which, as Yvette Delsaut has observed, girls learn how to walk and stand (hands behind the back, feet side by side), how to smile, how to go up and down stairs (Without looking at the feet), how to behave at table ('the hostess must ensure that everything happens smoothly, without anyone noticing'), how to speak to guests (,charm and politeness'), how to dress ('no garish, aggressive colours') and how to use make-up.

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whom they are linked, and a duty of selective refusal which adds the price of exclusivity to the effect of 'conspicuous consumption' .

The divisions constitutive of the social order and, more pre­ cisely, the social relations of domination and exploitation that are instituted between the sexes thus progressively embed themselves in two different· classes of habitus, in the form of opposed and complementary bodily hexis and principles of vision and division which lead to the classifying of all the things of the world and all practices according to distinctions that are reducible to the male/female opposition. It falls to men, who belong on the side of all things external, official, public, straight, high and discontinuous, to perform all the brief, dangerous and spectacular acts which, like the sacrifice of the ox, ploughing or harvesting, not to mention murder or war, mark breaks in the ordinary course of life; women, by contrast, being on the side of things that are internal, damp, low, curved and continu­ ous, are assigned all domestic labour, in other words the tasks that are private and hidden, even invisible or shameful, such as the care of the children or the animals, as well as all the exter­ nal tasks that are attributed to them by mythic reason, that is to say, those that involve water, grass and other green vegeta­ tion (such as hoeing and gardening), milk and wood, and espe­ cially the dirtiest, most monotonous and menial tasks. Because the whole of the finite world in which they are confined - the space of the village, the house, language, tools - contains the same silent calls to order, women can only become what they are according to mythic reason, thus confirming, and first in their own eyes, that they are naturally consigned to what is low, twisted, picayune, futile, menial, etc. They are condemned to give at every moment the appearances of a natural foundation to the diminished identity that is socially bestowed on them: they are the ones who perform the long, thankless, tedious task of picking up from the ground the olives or twigs that the men have brought down with a pole or an axe; they are the ones who, delegated to the vulgar preoccupations of the everyday manageIrl~!lt of the dQwestic economy, seem. to talce pleasure in the petty calculations of debt a"ud interest to which the man of honour does not stoop. (Thus I have a childhood memory from Beam of the men, neighbours and friends, who had

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killed the pig in the morning, after a brief and somewhat ostentatious display of violence - the screech of the escap­ ing animal, the wielding of big knives, the gush of blood, etc. - sitting all afternoon, and sometimes until the next morning, playing cards, barely pausing to lift a too-heavy caul­ dron, while the women of the house would bustle about preparing sausages, puddings and pates.) The men (and the women themselves) remain unaware that it is the logic of the relationship of domination which imposes on and inculcates in women not only the virtues that morality requires of them but also all the negative properties that the dominant view imputes to their nature, like cunning or, to take a more favourable feature, intuition.

What is called 'female intuition', a particular form of the special lucidity of the dominated, is, even in our own world, inseparable from the objective and subjective submissiveness which encourages or con­ strains the attentiveness and vigilance needed to anticipate desires or avoid unpleasantness. A good deal of research has brought to light the special perspicacity of the dominated, particularly women (and more especially of women who are doubly or triply dominated, like the black housemaids described by Judith Rollins in Between Women).47 Women are more sensitive than men to non-verbal cues (especially tone) and are better at identifying an emotion represented non­ verbally and decoding the implicit content of a dialogue;48 according to a survey by two Dutch researchers, they are capable of describing their husbands in great detail, whereas men can only describe their wives in very broad stereotypes valid for 'women in general' .49 The same authors suggest that homosexuals, who, having necessarily been raised as heterosexuals, have internalized the dominant point of view, may adopt this point of view on themselves (which condemns them to a kind of cognitive and evaluative dissonance tending to con­ tribute to their special perspicacity) and that they understand the point of view of the dominant better than the dominant understand theirs.

47 1. Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985). 48 C£ W. N. Thompson, Quantitative Research in public Address and Communication (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 47-8. 49 C£ A. Van Stolk and C. Wouters, 'Power changes and. self-respect: a comparison of two cases of established-outsiders relations', Theory, Culture and Society, 4, no. 2-3 (1987), pp. 477-88.

J

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Being symbolically condemned to resignation and discretion, women can exercise some degree of power only by turning the strength of the strong against them or by accepting the need to efface themselves and, in any case, to deny a power that they can only exercise vicariously, as 'eminences grises' . But (as Lucien Bianco says of peasant resistance in China) 'the weapons of the weak are always weak weapons.'so The symbolic strategies that women use against men, such as those of magic, remain domi­ nated, because the apparatus of symbols and mythic operators that they implement and the ends they pursue (such as the love of a loved man or the impotence of a hated man) are rooted in the androcentric view in the name of which they are domi­ nated. These strategies, which are not strong enough really to subvert the relation of domination, at least have the effect of confirming the dominant representation of women as maleficent beings, whose purely negative identity is made up essentially of taboos each of which presents a possibility of transgression. This is true in particular of all the forms of soft violence, sometimes almost invisible, that women use against the physical or symbolic violence of men, from magic, cunning, lies or passivity (particularly in sexual relations) to the posses­ sive love of the possessed, that of the Mediterranean mother or the mothering wife, who victimizes and induces guilt by victimizing herself and by offering her infinite devotion and mute suffering as a gift too great to be matched or as a debt that can never be repaid. Thus, whatever they do, women are condemned to furnish the proof of their malign nature and to justify the taboos and prejudice that they incur by virtue of their essential maleficence - in accordance with the logic, which can be described as tragic, whereby the social reality that produces domination often confirms the representations that domination invokes in order to justify itself

The androcentric view is thus continuously legitimated by the very practices that it determines. Because their dispositions are the product of embodiment of the negative prejudice against the female that is instituted in the order of things, women cannot but constantly confirm this prejudice. The logic is that of the curse, in the strong sense of a pessimistic self-fulfilling

50 L. Bianco, 'Resistance paysanne', ActuelMarx, no. 22 (1997), pp. 138-52.

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prophecy calling for its own validation and bringing about what it foretells. It is at work, daily, in a number of exchanges between the sexes: the same dispositions that incline men to leave women to deal with menial tasks and thankless, petty pro­ cedures (such as, in our societies, finding out prices, checking bills, asking for discounts), in short, to disencumber themselves of all the behaviours incompatible with their dignity, also lead them to accuse women of 'petty-mindedness' and 'mean­ spiritedness' and even to blame them if they fail in the under­ takings that have been abandoned to them, without giving them any credit if things go well,51

Symbolic violence

All the conditions for the full exercise of male domination are thus combined. The precedence universally accorded to men is affirmed in the objectivity of the social structures and the pro­ ductive or reproductive activities, based on a sexual division of the labour of biological and social production and reproduction which gives the better part to men, and also in the schemes immanent in everyone's habitus. These schemes, shaped by similar conditions, and therefore objectively harmonized, func­ tion as matrices of the perceptions, thoughts and actions of all members of the society historical transcendentals which, being shared by all, impose themselves on each agent as trans­ cendent. As a consequence, the androcentric representation of biological reproduction and social reproduction is invested with the objectivity of a common sense, a practical, doxic consensus on the sense of practices. And women themselves apprehend all reality, and in particular the power relations in which they

51 The interviews and observations that we made in the course of our research into the economy of the production of real estate gave us many opportunities to verify that this logiC is still at work, even today and dose to us (cf. P. Bourdieu, 'Un contrat sous contrainte', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociaies, 81-2 (Mar. 1990), pp. 34-51). Although men can no always affect the same haughty disdain for the petty preoccupations of economy (except perhaps in the cultural universes), it is not uncommon for them to assert their statutory loftiness, espedally when in positions of author­ ity, by manifesting their indifference to subordinate questions of practicality, which are often left to women.

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are held, through schemes of thought that are the product of embodiment of those power relations and which are expressed in the founding oppositions of the symbolic order. It follows that their acts of cognition are acts of practical recognition, doxic acceptance, a belief that does not need to be thought and affirmed as such, and which in a sense 'makes' the symbolic violence which it undergoes. 52

Although I have no illusions as to my ability to dispel all mis­ understanding in advance, I would simply. like to warn against the radical misinterpretations often made of the notion of symbolic vio­ lence, which all arise from a more or less reductive understanding of the adjective 'symbolic', which is used here in a sense that I believe to be rigorous, and whose theoretical basis I set out in an article two decades ago. 53 Taking 'symbolic' in one of its commonest senses, people sometimes assume that to emphasize symbolic violence is to minimize the role of physical violence, to forget (and make people forget) that there are battered, raped and exploited women, or worse, to seek to exculpate men from that form of violence - which is obvi­ ously not the case. Understanding 'symbolic' as the opposite of 'real, actual', people suppose that symbolic violence is a purely 'spiritual violence which ultimately has no real effects. It is this naive distinc­ tion, characteristic of a crude materialism, that the materialist theory of the economy of symbolic goods, which I have been trying to build up over many years, to destroy, by giving its proper place in theory to the objectivity of the subjective experience of relations of domination. Another misunderstanding; the reference to ethnology, of which I have tried to show the heuristic functions here, is suspected of being a way of restoring the myth of the' eternal feminine' (or mas­ culine) or, worse, of eternalizing the structure of masculine domina­ tion by describing it as unvarying and eternaL On the contrary, far from asserting that the structures of domination are ahistorical, I shall try to establish that they are the product of an incessant (and therefore historical) labour of reproduction, to which singular agents (including men, with weapons such as physical violence and symbolic violence) and institutions families, the church, the educational system, the state - contribute.

52 The verbal or non-verbal cues which deSignate the symbolically domi­ nant position (that of man, noble, chie£ etc.) can only be understood by people who have learned the 'code' (rather like military 'stripes' which one has to learn how to read). 53 C£ P. Bourdieu, 'Sur Ie pouvoir symbolique', Annales, no. 3 1977), pp. 405-11.

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The dominated apply categories constructed from the point of view of the dominant to the relations of domination, thus making them appear as natural. This can lead to a kind of systematic self-depreciation, even self-denigration, visible in par­ ticular, as has been seen, in the representation that Kabyle women have of their genitals as something deficient, ugly, even repulsive (or, in modern societies, in the vision that many women have of their bodies as not conforming to the aesthetic canons imposed by fashion), and, more generally, in their adherence to a demeaning image of woman. 54 Symbolic violence is instituted through the adherence that the dominated cannot fail to grant to the dominant (and therefore to the domination) when, to shape her thought of him, and herself, or, rather, her thought ofher rela­ tion with him, she has only cognitive instruments that she shares with him and which, being no more than the embodied form of the relation of domination, cause that relation to appear as natural; or, in other words, when the schemes she applies in order to perceive and appreciate herself, or to perceive and appreciate the dominant (highllow, male/female, whitelblack, etc.), are the product of the embodiment of the - thereby naturalized ­ classifications of which her social being is the product.

Being unable to evoke here with sufficient subtlety (it would take a Virginia Woolf to do so) sufficiently numerous, varied and cogent examples of concrete situations in which this gentle and often invisible violence is exerted, I shall simply refer to observations which, in their objectivism, are more persuasive than description of the minutiae of interactions. Surveys show, for example, that a large majority of French women say they want a husband who is older and also (quite coherently) taller than themselves; two-thirds of them even explicitly reject the idea of a husband shorter than themselves. 55 What is the

54 In interviews conducted in France in 1996, it was very common for women to say they found it difficult to accept their bodies. 55 In the same logic, Myra Marx Ferree, who points out that the main obsta­ cle to the transformation of the division of domestic labour lies in the fact that household tasks are perceived as 'unfit for "real men"', notes that women conceal the help they receive from their husbands for fear of diminishing them (cf. M. Marx Ferree, 'Sacrifice, satisfaction and social change: employ­ ment and the family', in K. Brooklin Sacks and D. Remy (eds), My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me (New BrunsWick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), p. 73).

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meaning of this refusal to see the disappearance of the ordinary signs of the sexual 'hierarchy? 'Accepting an inversion of ap­ pearances', replies Michel Bozon, 'is to suggest that it is the woman who dominates, which, paradoxically, lowers her socially; she feels diminished with a diminished man.'56 So it is not sufficient to note that women generally agree with men (who, for their part, prefer younger women) when they accept the external signs of a dominated position; in their represen­ tation of their relation with the man to which their social identity is (or will be) attached, they take account of the representation that men and women as a whole will inevitably form of him by applying to him the schemes of perception and appreciation universally shared (within the group in question). Because these common principles tacitly and un arguably demand that, at least in appearances and seen from outside, the man should occupy the dominant position within the couple, it is for him, for the sake of the dignity that they recognize a priori in him, but also for themselves, that they can only want and love a man whose dignity is clearly affirmed and attested in and by the fact that he is visibly 'above' them. This takes place, of course, without any calculation, through the apparent arbitrariness of an inclination that is not amenable to discussion or reason but which, as is shown by observation of the desired, and also real, differences, can only arise and be fulfilled in the experience of the superiority of which age and height (justified as indices of maturity and guarantees of security) are the most indisputable and universally recognized signs. 57

To follow through the paradoxes that only a dispositionalist view can make intelligible, one only has to note that those who show them­ selves to be most submissive to the 'traditional' model - by saying

56 M. Bozon, 'Les femmes et l'ecart d'age entre conjoints: une domination consentie', I: 'Types d'union et attentes en matiere d'ecart d'age', Population, 2 (1990), pp. 327-60; II: 'Modes d'entree dans la vie adulte et representa­ tions du conjoint', Population, 3 (1990), pp. 565-602; 'Apparence physique et choix du conjoint', [NED [Institut National des Etudes Demographiques], Congres et colloques, 7 (1991), pp. 91-110. 57 One might also mention here the very subtle games through which, in Kabylia, some women (of honour), although dominant in practice, were able to adopt a submissive posture enabling the man to appear and see himself as dominant.

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that they wish for a larger age-gap - are found mostly among the social categories of self-employed craftsmen, shopkeepers, farmers and manual workers, in which marriage remains, for women, the prime means of acquiring a social position - as if, being the product of an unconscious adjustment to the probabilities associated with an objec­ tive structure of domination, the submissive dispositions that are expressed in these preferences produced the equivalent of what could be a calculation of enlightened self-interest. By contrast, these dispo­ sitions tend to weaken - with, no doubt, effects of hysteresis which would emerge from analysis of variations in practices not only accord­ ing to the position occupied, but also according to trajectory - with the objective dependency that helps to produce and maintain them (the same logic of adjustment of dispositions to the objective chances also explaining why it can be observed that women's access to employment is a major factor in their access to divorce).s8 This tends to confirm that, contrary to the romantic representation of love, choice of partner is not exempt from a form of rationality that owes nothing to rational calculation, or, to put it another way, that love is often partly amor fati, love of one's social destiny.

So the only way to understand this particular form of domi­ nation is to move beyond the forced choice between constraint (by forces) and consent (to reasons), between mechanical coer­ cion and voluntary, free, deliberate, even calculated submission. The effect of symbolic domination (whether ethnic, gender, cultural or linguistic, etc.) is exerted not in the pure logic of knowing consciousnesses but through the schemes of percep­ tion, appreciation and action that are constitutive of habitus and which, below the level of the decisions of consciousness and the controls of the will, set up a cognitive relationship that is profoundly obscure to itself 59 Thus, the paradoxical logic of

58 Cf. B. Bastard and L. Cardia-Voueche, 'L'activite professionnelle des femmes: une ressource, mais pour qui? Une reflexion sur l'acces au divorce', Sociologie du Travail, no. 3 (1984), pp. 308-16. 59 Among so many testimonies or observations of experience of the sym­ bolic violence associated with linguistic domination, I shall only cite, for their exemplary character, those offered by Abiodun Goke-Pariola concerning post­ independence Nigeria: the perpetuation of an 'internalized denigration of everything native' is seen in a particularly striking way in the relations Nige­ rians have to their native language (which they will not allow to be taught in schools) and to the language of the former colonizers, which they speak 'adopting the bodily hexis of the British ... so as to produce what is regarded as the British nasal accent' (A. Goke-Pariola, The Role 0/ Language in the

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masculine domination and feminine submissiveness, which can, without contradiction, be described as both spontaneous and extorted, cannot be understood until one takes account of the durable effects that the social order exerts on women (and men), that is to say, the dispositions spontaneously attuned to that order which it imposes on them.

Symbolic force is a form of power that is exerted on bodies, directly and as if by magic, without any physical constraint; but this magic works only on the basis of the dispositions deposited, like springs, at the deepest level of the body.60 If it can act like the release of a spring, that is, with a very weak expenditure of energy, this is because it does no more than trigger the dis­ positions that the work of inculcation and embodiment has deposited in those who are thereby primed for it. In other words, it finds its conditions of possibility, and its economic equivalent (in an expanded sense of the word 'economic'), in the immense preliminary labour that is needed to bring about a durable transformation of bodies and to produce the perma­ nent dispositions that it triggers and awakens. This transforma­ tive action is all the more powerful because it is for the most part exerted invisibly and insidiously through insensible famil­ iarization with a symbolically structured physical world and early, prolonged experience of interactions informed by the structures of domination.

The practical acts of knowledge and recognition of the magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated that are triggered by the magic of symbolic power and through which the dominated, often unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly, contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting the limits imposed, often take the form of bodily emotions - shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety, guilt - or passions and sentiments - love, admiration, respect. These emotions are all the more powerful when they are betrayed in visible manifestations such as blushing, stuttering, clumsiness, trembling, anger or impotent

Struggle for Power and Legitimacy, African Studies, no. 31 (LeWiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993)). 60 It is possible to understand in these terms the symbolic efficacy of reli­ gious messages (papal bulls, preaching, prophecy, etc.), which is dearly based on previous religious socialization (catechism, church-going and, above all, immersion from an early age in a universe imbued with religiosity).

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rage, so many ways of submitting, even despite oneself and 'against the grain' [Ii son corps defendant], to the dominant judgement, sometimes in internal conflict and division of sel£ of experiencing the insidious complicity that a body slipping from the control of consciousness and will maintains with the censures inherent in the social structures.

The passions of the dominated habitus (whether dominated in terms of gender, ethnicity, culture or language) - a somatized social relationship, a social law converted into an embodied law - are not of the kind that can be suspended by a simple effort of will, founded on a liberatory awakening of consciousness. If it is quite illusory to believe that symbolic violence can be over­ come with the weapons of consciousness and will alone, this is because the effect and conditions of its efficacy are durably and deeply embedded in the body in the form of dispositions. This is seen, in particular, in the case of relations of kinship and all relations built on that model, in which these durable inclina­ tions of the socialized body are expressed and experienced in the logic of feeling (filial love, fraternal love, etc.) or duty, which are often merged in the experience of respect and devotion and may live on long after the disappearance of their social condi­ tions of production. Thus it is observed that when the external constraints are removed and formal liberties - the right to vote, the right to education, access to all occupations, including politics - are acquired, self-exclusion and 'vocation' (which 'acts' as much negatively as it does positively) take over from explicit exclusion. Exclusion from public places, which,' when it is explicitly laid down, as it is among the Kabyles, consigns women to separate spaces and makes approaching a male space, such as the edges of the assembly place, a terrifying ordeal, may elsewhere be achieved almost as effectively through the sociall:y imposed agoraphobia which may persist long after the abolition of the most visible taboos and which leads women to exclude themselves from the agora.

To point to the marks that domination durably imprints in bodies and the effects it exerts through them does not mean that one is offering support to that particularly vicious way of ratifying domination which consists in making women res­ ponsible for their own domination by suggesting, as people sometimes do, that they choose to adopt submissive practices

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('women are their own worst enemies') or even that they love their own domination, that they' enjoy' the treatment inflicted on them, in a kind of masochism inherent in their nature. It has to be acknowledged both that the 'submissive' dispositions that are sometimes used to 'blame the victim' are the product of the objective structures, and also that these structures only derive their efficacy from the dispositions which they trigger and which help to reproduce them. Symbolic power cannot be exercised without the contribution of those who undergo it and who only undergo it because they construct it as such. But instead of stopping at this statement (as constructivism in its idealist, ethnomethodological or other forms does) one has also to take note of and explain the social construction of the cog­ nitive structures which organize acts of construction of the world and its powers. It then becomes clear that, far from being the conscious, free, deliberate act of an isolated 'subject', this practical construction is itself the effect of a power, durably embedded in the bodies of the dominated in the form of schemes of perception and dispositions (to admire, respect, love, etc.) which sensitize them to certain symbolic manifesta­ tions of power.

Although it is true that, even when it seems to be based on the brute force of weapons or money, recognition of domina­ tion always presupposes an act of knowledge, this does not imply that one is entitled to describe it in the language of con­ sciousness, in an intellectualist and scholastic fallacy which, as in Marx (and above all, those who, from Lukacs onwards, have spoken of 'false consciousness'), leads one to expect the libera­ tion of women to come through the immediate effect of the 'raising of consciousness', forgetting for lack of a dispositional theory of practices - the opacity and inertia that stem from the embedding of social structures in bodies.

Although she shows well the inadequacy of the notion of' consent' obtained by 'persuasion and seduction', Jeanne Favret-Saada does. not really manage to escape from the choice between constraint and consent in the form of 'free acceptance' and 'explicit agreement', because, like Marx, from whom she borrows the language of aliena­ tion, she remains enclosed within a philosophy of 'consciousness' (thus she refers to the 'dominated, fragmented, contradictory con-

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sciousness of the oppressed [woman]' or the 'invasion of women's con­ sciousness by the physical, juridical and mental power of men'). Failing to take account of the durable effects that the male order exercises on women, she cannot adequately understand the enchanted sub­ mission which constitutes the specific effect of symbolic violence.61

The language of the 'imaginary' which one sees used somewhat recklessly here and there is even more inadequate than that of 'con­ sciousness' in as much as it inclines one in particular to forget that the dominant principle of vision is not a simple mental representa­ tion, a fantasy ('ideas in people's heads'), an ideology, but a system of structures durably embedded in things and in bodies. Nicole-Claude Mathieu, in a text entitled 'On the dominated consciousness',62 has probably gone furthest in the critique of the notion of consent, which 'denies virtually all responsibility on the part of the oppressor',63 and 'once more casts all the blame on the oppressed';64 but, because she has not abandoned the language of'consciousness', she is not quite as radical as she might be in her analysis of the limitations of the possibilities of thought or action that domination imposes on the oppressed65 and 'the invasion of their consciousness by the omni­ present power of men'.66

These critical distinctions are not at all gratuitous: they imply that the symbolic revolution called for by the feminist move­ ment cannot be reduced to a simple conversion of conscious­ nesses and wills. Because the foundation of symbolic violence lies not in mystified consciousnesses that only need to be enlightened but in dispositions attuned to the structure of domination of which they are the product, the relation of com­ plicity that the victims of symbolic domination grant to the

61 1. Favret-Saada, 'L'arraisonnement des femmes', Les Temps Modernes (Feb. 1987), pp. 137-50. 62 N.-C. Mathieu, 'De la conscience dominee', in Categorisation et ideologies de sexe (Pads: Cote-femmes, 1991). 63 Ibid., p. 225. 64 Ibid., p. 226. 65 Ibid., p. 216. 66 Ibid., p. 180. It should be noted in passing that the most decisive advances in the critique of the masculine vision of the relations of produc­ tion (such as the minimization, in discourse and ritual, of the specific contri­ bution of women) have found their most solid support in ethnolOgical analysis of practices, particularly of ritual (d. the texts brought together by N.-C. Mathieu in N. Echard, 0. Joumet/ C. Michard-Marchal, C. Ribery; N.-C. Mathieu and N. Tabet, VArraisonnement des femmes. Essais en anthropologie des sexes (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985).

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dominant can only be broken through a radical transformation of the social conditions of production of the dispositions that lead the dominated to take the point of view of the dominant on the dominant and on themselves. Symbolic violence is exercised only through an act of knowledge and practical recognition which takes place below the level of the con­ sciousness and will and which gives all its manifestations ­ injunctions, suggestions, seduction, threats, reproaches, orders or calls to order - their 'hypnotic power' . But a relation of domi­ nation that functions only through the complicity of disposi­ tions depends profoundly, far its perpetuation or transformation, on the perpetuation or transformation of the structures of which those dispositions are the product (and in particular on the structure of a market in symbolic goods whose fundamental law is that women are treated there as objects which circulate upwards).

Women in the economy of symbolic goods

Thus, dispositions (habitus) are inseparable from the structures (habitudines, in Leibniz's sense) that produce and reproduce them, in both men and women, and in particular from the whole structure of technical and ritual activities that is ulti­ mately grounded in the structure of the market in symbolic goods. 67 The principle of the inferiority and exclusion of women, which the mythico-ritual system ratifies and amplifies, to the point of making it the principle of division of the whole universe, is nothing other than the fundamental dissymmetry, that of subject and object, agent and instrument, which is set up between men and women in the domain of symbolic exchanges, the relations of production and reproduction of symbolic capital, the central device of which is the matrimonial market, and which are the foundation of the whole social order ­ women can only appear there as objects, or, more precisely, as

67 Anticipating some intuitions of modern philosophies, such as that of Peirce, Leibniz speaks of habitudines, durable ways of being, structures, result­ ing from evolution, to designate what is uttered in expression (G. W Leibniz, 'Quid sit idea', in Die Philosophische SchriJten, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1890), voL 7, pp. 263-4).

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symbols whose meaning is constituted outside of them and whose function is to contribute to the perpetuation or expan­ sion of the symbolic capital held by men. The true nature of the status conferred on women is revealed a contrario in the limiting case in which, to avoid the extinction of the lineage, a family without a male descendant has no alternative but to take for its daughter a man, the awrith, who, in contrast to patrilo­ cal custom, comes and lives in his wife's house and who thus circulates like a woman, in other words as an object ('he played the bride,' the Kabyles say). Since masculinity itself is called into question here, both in Bearn and in Kabylia, the whole group grants a kind of arbitrary indulgence to the subterfuges that the humiliated family resorts to in order to save the appear­ ances of its honour and, so far as it is possible, of the 'man­ object' who, in abnegating himself as a man, calls into question the honour of the host family.

The explanation of the primacy granted to masculinity in cul­ tural taxonomies lies in the logic of the economy of symbolic exchanges, and more precisely in the social construction of the relations of kinship and marriage alliance which assigns to women their social status as objects of exchange defined in accordance with male interests to help to reproduce the sym­ bolic capital of men. The incest taboo which Levi-Strauss sees as the act founding society, inasmuch as it entails the necessity of exchange as equal communication between men, is correla­ tive with the institution of the violence through which women are denied as subjects of the exchange and alliance that are set up through them, but by reducing them to the status of objects, or rather, of ~bolic instruments of male politics. Being con­ demned to circulate as tokens and thus to institute relations between men, they are reduced to the status of instruments of production or reproduction of symbolic and social capital. And perhaps, to complete the break with Levi-Strauss's purely 'semiological' view, we should see the circulation of women in de Sade, which, as Anne-Marie Dardigna puts it, 'makes the female body, literally, an assessable, interchangeable object circulating among men like currency', 68 as the disenchanted or

68 A.-M. Dardigna, Les Chateaux d'Eros ou les infortunes du sexe des femmes (Paris: Maspero, 1980), p. 88.

i

J

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privileged classes of capitalist societies of all practices directly or indirectly oriented towards the reproduction of social capital and sym­ bolic capital, such as negotiating a marriage or speaking in the men's assembly, among the Kabyles, or, elsewhere, playing a smart sport, holding a salon, giving a ball or founding a charitable institution. Such a restricted definition prevents a full understanding of the objective structure of the sexual division of 'tasks' or 'duties', which extends to

dom~ns of practice, and in particular to exchanges, with the dif­ ference between public, discontinuous, extra-ordinary male exchanges and private, even secret, continuous, ordinary female exchanges, and to religious or ritual activities, in which similar oppositions are observed.

This primordial investment in the social games (illusio) , which makes a man a real man the sense of honour, virility, 'manliness', or, as the Kabyles say, 'Kabylness' (thakbaylith) is the undisputed principle of all the duties towards oneself, the motor or motive of all that a man 'owes to himself', in other words what he must do in order to live up, in his own eyes, to a certain idea of manhood. It is indeed the relationship between a habitus constructed according to the fundamental division of the straight and the curved, the upright and the recumbent, the strong and the weak, in short, the male and the female, and a social space also organized according to this division, that gives rise - as urgent imperatives, things that must be done - to the agonistic investments of men, and the virtues, entirely composed of abstention and abstinence, of women.

Thus, the point of honour, that particular form of the sense of the game that is acquired through prolonged submission to the regularities and rules of the economy of symbolic goods, is the principle of the system of reproduction strategies through which men, the holders of the monopoly of the instruments of production and reproduction of symbolic capital, aim to secure the conservation or expansion of this capital - fertility strate­ gies, matrimonial strategies, educational strategies, economic strategies, inheritance strategies, all oriented towards the trans­ mission of inherited powers and privileges. 77 This necessity of

77 On the link between honour and matrimonial and inheritance strategies, see P. Bourdieu, 'Celibat et condition paysanne, Etudes rurales, 5-6 (Apr.-Sept. 1962), pp. 32-126; 'Les strategies matrimoniales dans Ie systeme des strategies de reproduction', Annates, 4-5 (July-Oct. 1972), pp. 1105-27;

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the symbolic order, made into a virtue, is the product of the embodiment of the tendency of honour (that is, of the sym­ bolic capital held in common by a lineage or - in the case of Beam and the noble families of the Middle Ages, and no doubt beyond - by a 'house') to perpetuate itself through the actions of the agents.

Women are excluded from all the public spaces, such as the assembly or the market, where the games ordinarily considered the most serious ones of human existence, such as the games of honour, are played out. Indeed, they are excluded a priori, so to speak, in the name of the (tacit) principle of equality in honour, according to which the challenge, because it honours its recipient, is valid only if it is addressed to a man (as opposed to a woman), and a man of honour, capable of providing a riposte which, inasmuch as it too contains a recognition, bestows honour. The perfect circularity of the process indicates that this is an arbitrary assignment.

Manliness and violence

If women, subjected to a labour of socialization which tends to diminish and deny them, learn the negative virtues of self-denial, resignation and silence, men are also prisoners, and insidiously victims, of the dominant representation. Like the dispositions towards submission, those which underlie the pursuit and exercise of domination are not inscribed in a nature, and they have to be learned through a long labour of social­ ization, in other words, as has been seen, of active differentia­ tion from the opposite sex. Being a man, in the sense of vir, implies an ought-to-be, a virtus, which imposes itself in the mode of self-evidence, the taken-for-granted. Like nobility, honour - which is inscribed in the body in the form of a set of seemingly natural dispositions, often visible in a particular way of sitting and standing, a tilt of the head, a bearing, a gait, bound up with a way of thinking and acting, an ethos, a belief, etc.

Y. Castan, Honnetete et relations sociales en Languedoc (1715-1780) (paris: Pion, 1974), pp. 17-18; R. A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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governs the man of honour, without the need for any external constraint. It directs (in both senses) his thoughts and practices like a force (one that can 'carry him away'), but without con­ straining him mechanically (he may evade the challenge, not rise to its demand); it guides his action like a logical necessity ('he cannot do otherwise' lest he deny himself), but without imposing itself as a rule, or as the implacable logical verdict of a kind of rational calculation. This higher force, which may lead him to accept as inevitable or self-evident, that is, without deliberation or examination, actions which others would see as impossible or unthinkable, is the transcendence of the social that has been made body and which functions as an arnor fan, love of destiny, the bodily inclination to realize an identity that has been constituted as a social essence and so transformed into a destiny. Nobility, or the point of honour (ni.f), in the sense of the set of dispositions regarded as noble (physical and moral courage, generosity, magnanimity, etc.), is the product of a social labour of nomination and inculcation at the end of which a social identity instituted by one of the 'invisible demarcation lines' laid down by the social world and known and recognized by all inscribes itself in a biological nature and becomes habitus, embodied social law.

Male privilege is also a trap, and it has its negative side in the permanent tension and contention, sometimes verging on the absurd, imposed on every man by the duty to assert his manli­ ness in all circumstances. 78 Inasmuch as its real subject is a col­ lective - the lineage or the house - itself shaped by the demands immanent in the symbolic order, the point of honour presents itself as an ideal, or, more precisely, as a system of demands which inevitably remains, in many cases, inaccessible. Manli­

78 And first and foremost, at least in North African societies, his sexual potency, as shown, according to the testimony, recorded in the 1960s, of a pharmacist in Algiers, by men's very frequent and very Widespread recourse to aphrodisiacs always very strongly represented in the armoury of tradi­ tional apothecaries. Virility is indeed subject to a more or less masked form of collective judgement, not only at the time of the rites of defloration of the bride, but also through women's conversations, which dwell extensively on sexual matters and lapses in potency. The rush to procure Viagra, both in Europe and the United States, when it first appeared in early 1998, together with many writings by psychotherapists and doctors, shows that anxiety over the physical manifestations of 'manliness' is far from being an exotic peculiarity.

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ness, understood as sexual or social reproductive capacity, but also as the capacity to fight and to exercise violence (especially in acts of revenge), is first and foremost a duty. Unlike a woman, whose essentially negative honour can only be defended or lost, since her virtue is successively virginity and fidelity, a 'real' man is someone who feels the need to rise to the challenge of the opportunities available to him to increase his honour by pur­ suing glory and distinction in the public sphere. Exaltation of masculine values has its dark negative side in the fears and anxiety aroused by femininity. Women, weak in themselves and sources of weakness, being the embodiments of the vulnerabil­ ity of honour, of h 'urma, the sacred of the left hand (female, as opposed to the male sacred of the right hand), and always exposed to offence, are also strong, armed with the weapons of weakness, such as devilish cunning, thah'raymith, and magic. 79 Everything thus combines to make the impossible ideal of viril­ ity the source of an immense vulnerability. It is this vulnerabil­ ity which paradoxically leads to sometimes frantic investment in all the masculine games of Violence, such as sports in modern societies, and most especially those which most tend to produce the visible signs of masculinity, so and to manifest and also test what are called manly virtues, such as combat sports. S!

79 As has been seen in the myth of origin, in which he discovered with stupor woman's pudenda and the (unreciprocated) pleasure that she revealed to him, man is situated, within the system of oppositions that links him to woman, on the side of good faith and naivety (niya), the perfect antitheses of thah'raymith. 80 C£ S. W. Fussell, Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Body Builder (New York: Poseidon, 1991), and L. Wacquant, 'Why men desire muscles', Body arui Societ.y, I, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 163-80. Lolc Wacquant rightly stresses the 'predicament of masculinity' as revealed in body-building, a 'passionate battle, as Barry Glassner calls it, against their own sense of vulnerability', and the 'multisided process through which the masculine illusio ... becomes progres­ sively instilled and inscribed in a particular biological individual' (pp. 171, 173). 81 The construction of the traditional Jewish habitus in central Europe, in the late nineteenth century, can be seen as a kind of perfect inversion of the process of construction of the male habitus as described here: the explicit refusal of the cult of Violence, even in its most ritualized forms, such as duelling or sport, led to a devalUing of physical exercises, especially the most violent ones, in favour of intellectual and spiritual exercises, favouring the development of gentle, 'peaceful' dispositions (confirmed by the rarity of rape and other crimes of Violence) (d V. Karady, 'Les juifS et la violence stalini­ enne', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, no. 120 (Dec. 1997), pp.3-31).

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Like honour - or shame, its reverse side, which we know, in contrast to guilt, is felt before others - manliness must be vali­ dated by other men, in its reality as actual or potential violence, and certified by recognition of membership of the group of 'real men' . A number of rites of institution, especially in educational or military milieux, include veritable tests of manliness oriented towards the reinforcement of male solidarity. Practices such as some gang rapes - a degraded variant of the group visit to the brothel, so common in the memoirs of bourgeois adolescents are designed to challenge those under test to prove before others their virility in its violent reality,82 in other words stripped of all the devirilizing tenderness and gentleness of love, and they dramatically demonstrate the heteronomy of all affir­ mations of virility, their dependence on the judgement of the male group.

Some forms of 'courage', those demanded or recognized by armies or police forces (and especially the 'elite corps' among them) and gangs of delinquents, but also, in more banal fashion, by some work communities - and which, particularly in the construction industry, for example, encourage or force men to flout safety measures and to deny or defy danger with reckless behaviour that leads to many accidents - spring, paradOxically, from the fear of losing the respect or admiration of the group, of 'losing face' in front of one's 'mates' and being relegated to the typically female category of 'wimps', 'girlies', 'fairies', etc. What is called 'courage' is thus often rooted in a kind of cow­ ardice: one has only to think of all the situations in which, to make men kill, torture or rape, the will to dominate, exploit or oppress has relied on the 'manly' fear of being excluded from the world of 'men' without weakness, those who are sometimes called 'tough' because they are tough on their own suffering and more especially on that of others - the assassins, torturers and 'hit men' of all dictatorships and all 'total institutions', even the most ordinary ones, such as prisons, barracks or boarding schools - but also the new 'hatchet men' of modern manage­

82 The link between Virility and violence is explicit in the Brazilian tradi­ tion, which describes the penis as a weapon (R. G. Parker, Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 37). There is an equally explicit correlation between penetration (foder) and domination (p. 42).

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ment, glorified by neoliberal hagiography, who, themselves often subject to ordeals of physical courage, manifest their viril­ ity by sacking their superfluous employees. Manliness, it can be seen, is an eminently relational notion, constructed in front of and for other men and against femininity, in a kind of fear of the female, firstly iti oneself

56 57 ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

a somatization of the relation of domination, which is thus nat­ uralized. It is through the training of the body that the most fundamental dispositions are imposed, those which make a person both inclined and able to enter into the social games most favourable to the development of manliness - politics, business, science, etc. (Early upbringing encourages boys and girls very unequally to enter into these games, and favours more strongly in boys the various forms of the libido dominandi which may find sublimated expressions in the 'purest' forms of the social libido, such as libido sciendi.) 1

Masculinity as nobility

Although the 'ideal' conditions that Kabyle society offered to the androcentric unconscious have largely disappeared and masculine domination has lost part of its immediate self­ evidence, some of the mechanisms which underlie this domi­ nation continue to function, such as the relation of circular causality that is set up between the objective structures of the social space and the dispositions that they produce in both men and women. The continuous, silent, invisible injunctions that the sexually hierarchized world into which they are thrown addresses to them prepare women, at least as much as explicit calls to order, to accept as self-evident, natural and 'going without saying' arbitrary prescriptions and proscriptions which, inscribed in the order of things, insensibly imprint themselves in the order of bodies.

Although the world always presents itself as strewn with indices and signs designating things to do or not to do, intimat­ ing the actions and movements that are possible, probable or impossible, the 'things to do' and 'the things forth-coming' that are offered by a henceforward socially and economically differ­ entiated universe are not addressed to an indifferent agent, a

lOne would need to cite all the observations which attest that, from ear­ liest 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).

ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

kind of interchangeable x, but are specified according to the positions and dispositions of each agent. They present them­ selves as things to be done or things that are not feasible, things that are natural or unthinkable, normal or extraordinary, for a given category, i.e. in particular for a man or for a woman (and of a given social position). The 'collective expectations', as Marcel Mauss would have said, or, in the language of Max Weber, the 'objective potentialities', that social agents discover at every moment have nothing abstract or theoretical about them, even if science must resort to statistics in order to grasp them. They are inscribed in the physiognomy of the familiar environment, in the form of the opposition between the public, masculine universe and private, female worlds, between the public space (the square or the street, the site of all dangers) and the house (it has often been observed that, in advertisements and cartoons, women are, most of the time, placed in the domes­ tic space, in contrast to men, who are rarely associated with the house but fairly often shown in exotic locations), between the places intended primarily for men, such as the bars and clubs of the Anglo-American world, which with their leather upholstery and heavy, dark, angular furniture present an image of hardness and manly toughness, and 'female' spaces, whose pastel shades, knick-knacks, lace or ribbons suggest fragility and frivolity.

It is no doubt in the encounter with the 'objective' expecta­ tions' inscribed, mostly in the implicit state, in the positions offered to women by the still very strongly sexually differenti­ ated division of labour that the so-called 'feminine' dispositions inculcated by the family and the whole social order are able to be fulfilled or even blossom, and, in this very process, to be rewarded, thereby helping to reinforce the fundamental sexual dichotomy, both in the jobs, which seem to call for submis­ siveness and the need for security, and in their occupants, who are identified with positions in which, enchanted or alienated, they both find themselves and lose themselves. The essentially social logic of what is called 'vocation' has the effect of pro­ ducing these kinds of harmonious encounters between disposi­ tions and positions in which the victims of symbolic domination can felicitously (in both senses) perform the subaltern or sub­ ordinate tasks that are assigned to their virtues of submission, gentleness, docility, devotion and self-denial.

59 58 ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

The socially sexed libido enters into communication with the institution which censors or legitimates its expression. 'Voca­ tions' are always in part the more or less fantasmatic anticipa­ tion of what the post promises (for example, for a secretary, typing documents), and what it pennits (for example, a rela­ tionship of mothering or seduction with the boss). And the encounter with the post may have an effect of revelation inas­ much as, through the explicit or implicit expectations that it contains, it authorizes and favours certain behaviours that are technical and social but also sexual, or sexually marked. Thus the world of work is full of little isolated occupational milieux (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 envel­ opment or seduction, and, both overburdened with work and taking charge of everything that happens in the institution, offers a generalized protection to a generally female junior staff (nurses, assistants, secretaries) who are thereby encouraged to make an intense, sometimes pathological, investment in the institution and the person who embodies it.

But these objective chances are also recalled in a very con­ crete and tangible way, not only in all the signs of hierarchy in the division of labour (doctor/nurse, executive/secretary, etc.) but also in all the visible manifestations of the differences between the sexes (bearing, dress, hairstyle) and, more generally, in the seemingly insignificant details of everyday behaviours which contain countless imperceptible cans to order.2 Thus, in the television studio, women are almost always

2 Detailed analysis would be needed of all the social effects of what statis­ tics register as the rate of feminization. It is known, for example, that the prospect of feminization of an occupation reduces its desirability and pres­ tige (c£ 1. C. Tonhey, 'Effects of additional women profeSSionals on rating of occupational prestige and desirability', Journal of Personality and Social Psy­ chology, 29, no. I (1974), pp. 86-9). It is less well known that sex ratio has effects of its own: for example, it favours the acquisition of a set of disposi­ tions which, without being explicitly stipulated in the official syllabus, are inculcated in a diffuse way (cf. M. Duru-Bellat, L'Ecole des jilles. QueUe for­ ma.rion pour quels roles sociaux (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1990), p. 27). It has even been observed that girls tend to be less successful in branches of technical education in which they are in a minority (ibid.).

ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

confined to minor roles, variations on the role of 'hostess' traditionally assigned to the 'weaker sex'; even when they are not flanked by a man, for whom they serve as a fOil, and who often plays on all the ambiguities implied in the 'couple' rela­ tionship, through jokes and more or less subtle allusions, they have difficulty in imposing themselves and what they have to say, and are relegated to a conventional role of 'host' or 'pre­ senter'. When they take part in a public debate, they must fight unceasingly for a chance to speak and to keep attention, and the belittling they suffer is all the more implacable because it is not inspired by any explicit ill-will and is exercised with the perfect innocence of unawareness: men will interrupt them, and, with perfect good faith, address to a man the answer to a perfectly intelligent question just asked by a woman (as if, by definition, such a question could only come from a man). This virtual denial of their existence often forces them to resort to the weapons of the weak, which confirm the stereotypes - an outburst that is inevitably seen as an unjustified whim or as an exhibition that is immediately defined as hysterical; or seduc­ tion, which, inasmuch as it is based on a form of recognition of domination, tends to reinforce the established relation of sym­ bolic domination. And one would need to enumerate all the cases in which the best-intentioned of men (for symbolic vio­ lence does not operate at the level of conscious intentions) perform discriminatory acts, excluding women, without even thinking about it, from positions of authority, reducing their demands to whims that can be answered with a mollifying word or a tap on the cheek, 3 or, with an apparently opposite inten­ tion, reminding them of and in a sense redUcing them to their femininity, by drawing attention to their hairstyle or some other physical feature, or using familiar terms of address ('darling', 'dear', etc.) in a formal situation (doctor and patient, for example) - so many infinitesimal 'choices' of the unconscious which come together to help to construct the diminished situ­ ation of women and whose cumulative effects are recorded in

3 A number of (female) observers have noted the dissymmetry between men and women in what Nancy Henley calls 'the politics of touching', in other words the ease and frequency of bodily contact (a hand on the cheek, an arm round shoulder or waist, etc.).

-

61 60 ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

the statistics on the very weak representation of women in positions of power, especially economic and political power.

In fact, it is not exaggerated to compare masculinity to a nobility. To be persuaded of this, one only has to observe the double standard, with which the Kabyles are very familiar, applied in the evaluation of male and female activities. Not only can a man not stoop without degrading himself to certain tasks that are socially defined as inferior (not least because it is unthinkable that a man should perform them), but the same tasks may be noble and difficult, when performed by men, or insignificant and imperceptible, easy and futile, when per­ formed by women. As is seen in the difference between the chef and the cook, the couturier and the seamstress, a reput­ edly female task only has to be taken over by a man and per­ formed outside the private sphere in order for it to be thereby ennobled and transfigured: 'Work', as Margaret Maruani observes, 'is always different depending on whether it is per­ formed by men or by women.' If the statistics establish that so­ called skilled (qualifies) jobs are more often held by men whereas the work assigned to women is more often 'unquali­ fied', this is partly because every job, whatever it may be, is in a sense qualified by being performed by men (who, in this respect, are all, by definition, of 'quality').4 Thus, just as the most perfect mastery of fencing could not open the doors of the noblesse d'epee to a commoner, so 'keyboard operators' (clav­ istes) , whose entry into the publishing trades aroused formi­ dable resistance on the part of men, who saw a threat to their occupational mythology of highly skilled labour, were not rec­ ognized as performing the same trade (metier) as their male col­ leagues, from whom they are separated by a simple curtain, although they perform the same labour: 'Whatever they do, clavistes are typists and have no qualification. Whatever they do, the COTTecteurs are professionals of the publishing world and are therefore highly skilled.'s And after long struggles by women for recognition of their skills, the tasks that techno­ logical changes had radically redistributed between men and

4 M. Maruani and C. Nicole, Au Labeur des dames. Metiers masculins, emplois feminins (Paris: Syros/Altematives, 1989), p. 15. 5 Ibid., pp. 34-77.

ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

women were arbitrarily redefined so as to impoverish women's work while maintaining the superior value of men's work. 6 It can be seen that the Kabyle principle that the work of a woman is condemned to remain invisible - she is expected to labour all day in the house, 'like a fly in the whey; outside the house, nothing of her work is seen,7 - continues to apply in a seem­ ingly very different context, as is shown by the fact that women are still very commonly denied the hierarchical title corre­ sponding to their real work.

'Collective expectations', positive or negative, through the subjective expectations that they impose; tend to inscribe themselves in bodies in the form of permanent dispositions. Thus, by virtue of the universal law of the adjustment of expec­ tations to chances, aspirations to possibilities, prolonged and invisibly diminished experience that is sexually characterized through and through tends, by discouraging it, to undermine even the inclination to perform acts that are not expected of women - without them even being denied to them. As is shown clearly by this testimony on the changes in dispositions follow­ ing a change of sex, it favours the appearance of a 'learned help­ lessness': 'The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incom­ petent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I felt myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, I found it so myself' 8 This is a magnificent evocation, made pos­ sible by comparison, of the kind of reverse or negative Pyg­ malion effect that is exerted so early and so continuously on women that it ends up being completely unnoticed (I am think­ ing, for example, of the way in which parents, teachers and fellow pupils discourage - or, one might say, 'non-encourage' ­ girls from choosing certain subjects, especially scientific and

6 Perpetuation of arbitrary differences can be based on the most archaic divisions of the mythic worldview, between hot and cold, for example, as is seen in the glass industry, where there is a division between the hot sector (the foundry, the site of manufacture), which is male and regarded as noble, and the cold sector (inspection, sorting, packaging), which is less noble and left to women (H. Sumiko Hirata, Paradigmes d'organisation industriels et rapports sociaux. Comparaison Bresil-france-Japon (Paris: IRESCO, 1992). 7 P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity; 1990), p. 276. 8 J. Morris, Conundrum (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 165-6.

62 63 ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

technical ones: 'The teachers always tell us we have less stamina, and ... we end up believing it.' 'They constantly tell us the sciences are easier for boys. So, naturally .. .') And it is understandable, in terms of this logic, that 'chivalrous' protec­ tion itself may not only lead to their confinement or serve to justify it, but can help to keep women away from all contact with all the aspects of the real world 'for which they are not made' because those things are not made for women.

All the calls to order inscribed in the order of things, all the silent injunctions or muted threats inherent in the normal course of the world are, of course, specified according to the particular fields, and the difference between the sexes presents itself to women, in each field, in spedfic forms, through for example the dominant definition of practice that prevails within it and which no one would think of seeing as sexed and there­ fore open to question. The particularity of the dominant is that they are in a position to ensure that their particular way of being is recognized as universal. The definition of excellence is in any case charged with masculine implications that have the particularity of not appearing as such. The definition of a post, especially one of authority, includes all kinds of sexually char­ acterized abilities and aptitudes: if so many positions are so dif­ ficult for women to occupy, it is because they are tailor-made for men whose manliness is itself constructed by opposition to women as they are today. To succeed completely in holding a position, a woman would need to possess not only what is explicitly demanded by the job description, but also a whole set of properties which the male occupants normally bring to the job - a physical stature, a voice, or dispositions such as aggressiveness, self-assurance, 'role distance', what is called natural authority, etc., for which men have been tacitly pre­ pared and trained as men.

In other words, the norms by which women are measured are in no way universal. What is called universalist feminism, because it ignores the effect of domination and all that the apparent universality of the dominant owes to his relation to the dominated - here, everything concerned with manliness ­ inscribes in the universal definition of the human being histor­ ical properties of the manly man, constructed in opposition to women. But what is called differentialist feminism, because it

ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

too ignores what the dominant definition owes to the histori­ cal relation of domination and to the pursuit of difference that is constitutive of it (what is manliness, ultimately, but a non­ femininity?), equally does not escape a gentle form of essen­ tialism in its concern to enhance the value of female experience: just as negritude as advocated by Senghor accepted some features of the dominant definition of the black, such as sensitivity, so too this feminism forgets that the 'difference' only appears when one adopts the point of view of the dominant on the dominated and that precisely that from which it seeks to differentiate itself (for example, by exalting, as Chodorow does, relatedness in'opposition to masculine separat­ edness, or, like some advocates of women's writing, a particular relation to the body) is the product of a historical relation of differentiation.

Female being as being-perceived

Everything in the genesis of the female habitus and in the social conditions of its actualization combines to make the female experience of the body the limiting case of the universal expe­ rience of the body-for-others, constantly exposed to the objec­ tification performed by the gaze and the discourse of others. The relation to one's own body cannot be reduced to a 'body image', in other words the subjective representation ('self­ image' or 'looking-glass self), associated with a certain degree of 'self-esteem', that an agent has of his or her social effects (seductiveness, charm, etc.) and which is largely built up from

. the objective representation of the body, descriptive or norma­ tive 'feedback' supplied by others (parents, peers, etc.). Such a model forgets that the whole social structure is present at the heart of the interaction, in the form of schemes of perception and appreciation inscribed in the bodies of the interacting agents. These schemes, in which a group embeds its funda­ mental structures (as big/small, strong/weak, coarse/fine, etc.), are interposed from the outset between every agent and his or her body, because the reactions or representations that one's body gives rise to in others and one's own perception of those reactions are themselves constructed according to those

65 64 ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

schemes. A reaction produced on the basis of the oppositions big/small and malelfemale (like all judgements of the type 'she's too tall for a girl', or 'it's a shame, in a girl', or 'it doesn't matter so much in a boy', a variant of the Kabyle saying, 'There are no faults for a man') is an opportunity to acquire the schemes concerned, which, when turned by the subject herself on her own body, will produce the same reaction, and to feel the practical experience of the body that they induce.

Thus, the perceived body is socially doubly determined. On the one hand, in even its seemingly most natural aspects (its volume, height, weight, musculature, etc.) it is a social product that depends on its social conditions of production through various mediations, such as working conditions (especially as regards the associated deformations and occupational diseases) and eating habits. Bodily hexis, which includes both the strictly physical shape of the body ('physique') and the way it is 'carried', deportment, bearing, is assumed to express the 'deep being', the true 'nature' of the 'person', in accordance with the postulate of the correspondence between the 'physical' and the 'moral' which gives rise to the practical or rationalized knowl­ edge whereby 'psychological' and 'moral' properties are associ­ ated with bodily or physiognomic indices (e.g. a thin, sleek body tends to be perceived as the sign of a manly control of bodily appetites). But this language of nature, which is supposed to reveal both what is most hidden and what is most true, is in fact a language of social identity, thereby naturalized, in the form for example of 'vulgarity' and what is called 'natural distinction' .

On the other hand, these bodily properties are apprehended through schemes of perception whose use in acts of evaluation depends on the position occupied in social space: the prevail­ ing taxonomies tend to oppose and hierarchize those proper­ ties most frequent among the dominant and those most frequent among the dominated (thin/fat, big/small, elegant! coarse, delicate/gross, etc.V The social representation of his or

9 Dominique Merllie has brought to light a similar mechanism by analysing the differential perception that boys and girls have of the difference between male and female handWriting (d. D. Merllie, 'Le sexe de l'ecriture. Note sur la perception sociale de la feminite', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociaies, 83 (June 1990), pp. 40-51).

ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

her body, which every agent has to reckon with, probably from a very early age, is thus obtained by the application of a social taxonomy whose principle is the same as that of the bodies to which it is applied, 10 Thus, the gaze is not a simple universal and abstract power to objectify, as Sartre maintained: it is a sym­ bolic power whose efficacy depends on the relative position of the perceiver and the perceived and on the degree to which the schemes of perception and appreciation that are brought into play are known and recognized by the person to whom they are applied.

The practical experience of the body, which is generated in the application to one's own body of the fundamental schemes springing from embodiment of the social structures and which is continuously reinforced by the reactions, generated by the same schemes, that one's own body produces in others, is one of the principles of the construction in each agent of a durable rela­ tion to his or her own body. This particular way of bearing the body, of presenting it to others, expresses, above all, the distance between the body as practically experienced and the legitimate body, and, by the same token, a practical anticipation of the chances of success of interactions which helps to define those chances (through features commonly described as assurance, self-confidence, ease, etc.). The probability of experiencing the body with embarrassment (the form par excellence of the expe­ rience of the 'alienated body'), malaise, timidity or shame rises with the discrepancy between the socially demanded body and the practical relation to the body that is imposed by the gazes and reactions of others. It varies very strongly according to sex and position in the social space. Thus, the opposition between big and small, which, .as a number of experiments have shown, is one of the fundamental principles of the experience that agents have of their bodies and of all the practical use that they

10 Thus bodies would have every chance of being valued strictly in accor­ dance with the positions of their owners in the social space if the autonomy of the logic of biological heredity did not sometimes, and exceptionally, bestow on the economically and SOcially most deprived the rarest bodily properties, such as beauty (which is then called 'fatal' because it threatens the established order), and if, conversely, the accidents of genetics did not sometimes deprive the 'great' of the bodily attributes of their position such as beauty or height.

67 66 ANAMNESIS OF WE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

itllmake of it, in particular the place they assign to (the common representation which gives the man the dominant position, that of the protector who enfolds, watches over, looks down from above, etc. 12), is specified between the sexes, which are themselves conceived through this opposition. In accor­ dance with a loiic that is also seen at work in the relation between dominated and dominant within the social space, and which leads each side to apply the same opposition, but giving opposite values to the tenns that it opposes, Seymour Fisher observes that men tend to be dissatisfied with parts of their bodies that they judge 'too small' whereas women tend to be critical of parts of their bodies that they judge 'too big'.

Masculine domination, which constitutes women as symbolic objects whose being (esse) is a being-perceived (percipi), has the effect of keeping them in a permanent state of bodily insecu­ rity, or more precisely of symbolic dependence. They exist first through and for the gaze of others, that is, as welcoming, attrac­ tive and available objects. They are expected to be 'feminine', that is to say, smiling, friendly, attentive, submissive, demure, restrained, self-effacing. And what is called 'femininity' is often nothing other than a form of indulgence towards real or sup­ posed male expectations, particularly as regards the aggran­ dizement of the ego. As a consequence, dependence on others (and not only men) tends to become constitutive of their being.

This heteronomy is the principle of dispositions such as the desire to draw attention and to please, sometimes perceived as coquettishness, or the propensity to expect a great deal from love, which, as Sartre says, is the only thing capable of provid­ ing the feeling of being justified in the particularities of one's being, starting with one's body.13 Continuously under the gaze

11 C£ on this point S. Fisher and C. E. develand, Body Image and Person­ ality (princeton and New York: Van Nostrand, 1958). 12 On the relation of protective enfolding as expressed in advertiSing, c£ E. Goffman, 'The ritualization of subordination', in Gender Advertisements (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 40-56. 13 If women are particularly inclined to what is called romantic love this is no doubt partly because they have a particular self-interest in it: not only does it promise to free them from masculine domination, but, both in its most ordinary form, with marriage, in which, in male societies, women circulate upwards, and in its extra-ordinary forms, it also offers them a route, some­ times the only one, to upward social mobility.

ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

of others, women are condemned constantly to experience the discrepancy between the real body to which they are bound and the ideal body towards which they endlessly strive. 14 Needing the gaze of others to constitute themselves, they are continuously oriented in their practice by the anticipated eval­ uation of the price that their bodily appearance, their way of bearing and presenting it, may receive (hence the more or less marked propensity to self-denigration and to the embodiment of social judgement in the form of physical embarrassment and timidity).

It is in the petite bourgeoisie, which, because of its position in the social space, is particularly exposed to all the effects of anxiety about

sodal gaze, that women reach the extreme form of symbolic alien­ ation. (In other words the effects of social position may in some cases, as they do here, reinforce the effects of gender, or in other cases atten­ uate them, without, it seems, ever eliminating them.) By contrast, intensive practice of a sport leads to a profound transformation of the subjective and objective experience of the body. It no longer exists only for others or, which amounts to the same thing, for the mirror (an instrument with which one can not only see oneself but try to see how one is seen and endeavour to make oneself look as one wishes to be seen); it is no longer merely a thing that is made to be looked at or which one has to look at in order to prepare it to be looked at. Instead of being a body for others it becomes a body for oneself; the passive body becomes an active and acting body. In the eyes of men, however, those women who break the tacit relation of availability and in a sense reappropriate their body image, and with it their body, appear as 'unfeminine', even lesbian - the affirmation of intellectual independence, which also reveals itself in bodily manifestations, pro­ duces entirely similar effects. 15 More generally, access to power of any kind places women in a 'double bind': if they behave like men, they risk losing the obligatory attributes of 'femininity' and call into ques­ tion the natural right of men to the positions of power; if they behave

14 Cosmetic which absorb much time, money and energy (differentially between classes), encounter their limiting case in cos­ metic surgery, which has become a vast industry in the United States (With a million and a half clients a year - c£ S. Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1993), p.25). . 15 C£ C. A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 121ff.

J

69 68 ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

like women, they appear incapable and unfit for the job. These con­ tradictory expectations simply take over from those to which they are structurally exposed as objects offered on the market in symbolic goods, simultaneously invited to use all means to please and charm and expected to repel the seductive manoeuvres that this kind of sub­ mission in advance to the verdict of the male gaze may seem to have provoked. This contradictory combination of openness and closedness, restraint and seduction, is all the more difficult to achieve because it is subject to the appreciation of men, who may make unconscious or self-interested errors of interpretation. Thus, as one female infonnant pointed out, faced with men's sexual jokes, women often have no other choice than to exclude themselves or participate, at least pas­ sively, in order to try to integrate themselves, but then running the risk of no longer being able to protest if they are victims of sexism or sexual harassment.

Sandra Lee Bartky, who gives an extremely perceptive description of the female experience of the body, is wrong, it seems to me, to attribute the inculcation in women of 'profound anxieties about their bodies' and 'an acute sense of their physical unworthiness' solely to the pressure of the 'fashion-beauty complex' .16 The influence of these institutions is undeniable, but they do no more than reinforce the effect of the fundamental relationship instituting women in the position of a being-perceived condemned to perceive itself through the dominant, i.e. masculine, categories. And to understand the 'masochistic dimension' of female desire, in other words the 'eroticization of social relations of domination'l7 (,for many women, dominance in men is exciting,' as Bartky puts it

l8 ), one

has to hypothesize that women look to men (and also, but secondarily, to the 'fashion-beauty complex') for subterfuges to reduce their 'sense of physical inadequacy'; and it can be assumed that the gaze of the powerful, which carries author­ ity, especially among other men, is particularly able to fulfil this function of reassurance. 19

16 S. Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 41. 17 Ibid., p. 51. 18 Ibid., p. 51 and also p.47. 19 In particular, the dominant agent has the power to impose his own vision of himself as objective and collective (the limiting case being represented by equestrian statues or official portraits), to make other people abdicate their

ANAMNESIS OF THE HIDDEN CONSTANTS

The female vision of the male vision

The structure imposes its constraints on the two terms of the relationship of domination, and therefore on the dominant themselves, who can benefit from it while being, in Marx's phrase, 'dominated by their domination'. And this is because, as is shown well enough by all the games associated with the opposition between the big and the small, the dominant cannot fail to apply to themselves, that is, to their bodies and to every­ thing they are and do, the schemes of the unconscious, which, in their case, give rise to formidable demands - as is sensed, and tacitly recognized, by the women who do not want a husband smaller than themselves. And so one has to analyse, in its con­ tradictions, the masculine experience of domination, turning for this purpose to Virginia Woolf not so much to the author of those endlessly quoted classics of feminism, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, as to the novelist, the author of To the Lighthouse, who, no doubt aided by the anamnesis favoured by the work of writing,20 presents an evocation of the relations between the sexes freed from all the cliches on sex, money and power that still persist in her more theoretical texts. For in the background of this narrative one finds an incomparably lucid evocation of the female gaze, which is itself particularly lucid on the desperate, and in its triumphant unawareness somewhat tragic, effort that every man has to make to rise to his own childhood conception of manhood.

This concerned and indulgent lucidity is evoked right from the start of the novel. It is probable that, unlike Mrs Ramsay, who fears that her husband has been overheard, most readers, especially male ones, do not understand or even notice the strange and even ridiculous situation in which Mr Ramsay has

generic capacity to objectify, as in love or belief, and he thus constitutes himself as an absolute subject, with no exterior, fully justified in existing as he exists. 20 Virginia Woolf was aware of the paradox, which will surprise only those who have a simplistic view of literature and its ways of truth-telling: 'I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction' (Y. Woolf, The Pargiters (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977), p. 9). Or again: 'Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact' (Y. Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth, 1929), p. 7).

89 88 PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

and its socially oriented left hand, it reproduces the archetypal division between male and female, with women being linked to the left hand as its administrators and as the main recipients of its benefits and services. IS

This brief review of the set of agencies which play a part in reproducing the hierarchy of the genders should make it pos­ sible to outline the programme for a historical analysis of the constancies and transformations of these agencies; this alone can provide the instruments needed to understand both the often surprising permanent features to be observed in the con­ dition of women (and to do so without simply invoking mas­ culine resistance or ill-will l6 or the responsibility of women themselves) and also the visible or invisible changes that have occurred in recent times.

The factors of change

The major change has doubtless been that masculine domina­ tion no longer imposes itself with the transparency of some­ thing taken for granted. Thanks, in particular, to the immense critical effort of the feminist movement, which, at least in some regions of the social space, has managed to break the circle of generalized mutual reinforcement, it now appears, in many contexts, as something to be avoided, excused or justified. The calling into question of the self-evident comes hand in hand with the substantive transformations seen in the con­ dition of women, especially in the most advantaged social categories. There are, for example, increased access to sec­ ondary and higher education and waged work, and, through this, to the public sphere; and a degree of distancing from

15 This reminder of the function of the state as the instrument of a medi­ ated exercise of power counters the tendency to make masculine power over women (and children) in the family the primordial site of masculine domi­ nation; the reminder of the differentiation of this function dispels the false debate, which has divided some feminists, over whether the state is oppres­ sive or liberatory for women. 16 This factor is of course far from negligible and acts through the aggre­ gation of individual actions both at home and at work, and also through semi­ concerted symbolic actions such as those of 'the new machismo' and some critiques of 'political correctness'.

PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

domestic tasks l ? and reproductive functions (linked to the development and generalized use of contraception and the reduction of family size), with, in particular, the postponement of marriage and procreation, reduction of the interruption of professional activity due. to childbirth, and also increased divorce and a lower rate of marriage. 18

Of all the factors of change, the most important are those that are linked to the decisive transformation of the function of the educational system in reproducing the differences between the genders, such as women's increased access to education and, consequently, to economic independence, and the transforma­ tion of family structures (resulting, in particular, from increased rates of divorce). It is true that even when the real family has changed, the inertia of habitus, and of law, tends to perpetuate the dominant model of family structure and, by the same token, of legitimate sexuality - heterosexual and oriented towards reproduction - in relation to which socialization and with it the transmission of the traditional principles of division were tacitly organized; but the appearance of new types of family, such as 'composite' families, and the public visibility of new (particu­ larly homosexual) models of sexuality help to break the doxa and expand the space of what is possible in terms of sexuality. In addition, and in a more banal way, the increased number of working women could not fail to affect the division of house­ hold tasks and therefore the traditional male and female models,

17 An important factor of change has been the growing number of house­ hold appliances and technical devices which (in a differential way according to social position) have helped to reduce the burden of household tasks ­ cooking, washing, cleaning, shopping, etc. (as is shown by the fact that the amount of time devoted to domestic work has steadily declined both in Europe and in the US), whereas time devoted to child care is harder to com­ press (although it is more evenly shared), despite the growth of creches and nursery schools. 18 C£ L. W. Hoffman, 'Changes in family roles, socialization and sex dif­ ferences', American Prychologist, 32 (1977), pp. 644-57. It is not possible to evoke, even in a few words, the set of changes that the massive entry of women to secondary and higher education has brought about, particularly in the political and religious fields, and also in the set of strongly feminized occupations. I shall simply name, as an example, the workers' movements of an entirely new type which have called themselves 'coordinations' (c£ D. Kergoat (ed.), Les Infirmieres et leur coordination, 1988-1989 (Paris: Lamarre, 1992).

91 90 PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

which has no doubt had consequences for the acquisition of the sexually differentiated dispositions within the family. It has been observed, for example, that the daughters of working mothers have higher career aspirations and are less attached to the traditional model of a woman's role. 19

But one of the most important changes in the status of women and one of the most decisive factors of change is undoubtedly the increased access of girls to secondary and higher education, which, together with the transformations of the structures of production (particularly the development of large public and private bureaucracies and the social techno­ logies of management), has led to a very important modifica­ tion of the position of women in the division of labour. Women are now much more strongly represented in the intellectual professions, in administration and in the various forms of sale of symbolic services - journalism, television, cinema, radio, public relations, advertising, design and decoration; and they have intensified their presence in the occupations closer to the traditional definition of female activities (teaching, social work and paramedical activities). This having beel). said, while female graduates have found their main career openings in intermedi­ ate middle-range occupations (middle management, technical staff, medical and social personnel), they remain practically excluded from positions of authority and responsibility, par­ ticularly in industry, finance and politics.

The changes visible in conditions in fact conceal permanent features in the relative positions: the levelling-out of the chances of access and rates of representation should not be allowed to mask the inequal­ ities which persist in the distribution of boys and girls among the various types of schooling and therefore among possible careers. More girls than boys obtain the baccalaureate and enter higher education, but they are much less represented in the most prestigious sections: they remain considerably underrepresented in scientific sections whereas they are ever more represented in literary courses. Similarly, in vocational lycees they remain largely confined to the low­

specialisms traditionally regarded as 'female' (those of local government clerk or shop assistant, secretary or nurse), while other specialist courses (mechanical, electrical or electronic engineering) are

19 Hoffman, 'Changes in family roles'.

PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

practically reserved for boys. In the medical faculties, the proportion of women declines as one moves up the hierarchy of specialisms, some of which, such. as surgery, are practically closed to them, whereas others, such as pediatrics or gynaecology, are reserved for them. As can be seen, the structure is perpetuated in pairs of oppositions homologous with the traditional divisions, such as the oppositions between the Grandes and the faculties; or, within the faculties, between the law or medical faculties and the humanities faculties; or, within the humanities, between philosophy or sociology and psychology or art history. We also know that the same principle of division still applies within each diScipline, assigning to men the most noble, the most synthetic and the most theoretical studies, and to women the most analytical, the most practical and the least prestigious. 2o

The same logic governs access to the various professions and to the various positions within each of them: in work as in edu­ cation, the progress made by women must not conceal the cor­ responding progress made by men, so that, as in a handicap race, the structure of the gaps is maintained. 21 The most striking example of this permanence in and through change is the fact that positions which become feminized are either already devalued (the majority of semi-skilled workers are women or immigrants) or declining, their devaluation being intensified, in a snowball effect, by the desertion of the men which it helped to induce. Moreover, while it is true that women are found at all levels of the social space, their chances of access (and rate of representation) decline as one moves towards the rarest and most sought-after positions (so that the rate of actual and potential feminization is no doubt the best index of the rela­ tive position and value of the various occupations).22

20 On the difference between the sexes in philosophical choices) c£ Charles Soullie, 'Anatomie du gout philosophique', Actes de fa Recherche en Sciences Sociales, no. 109 (Oct. 1995), pp. 3-28. 21 R. M. Lagrave, 'Une emancipation sous tutelle. Education et travail des femmes au XXe siecle', in G. Duby and M. Perrot (eds), Histoire des femmes, vol. 5: Le XXe siecle (Paris: PIon, 1992). 22 H. Y. Meynaud, 'L' acces au dernier cercle. La participation des femmes aux instances de pouvoir dans les entreprises', Revue Fran{:aise des Affaires Sociales, 42, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1988), pp. 67-87; 'Au cceur de l'entreprise EDF, 1a 1ente montee des e1ectriciens dans les postes de pouvoir', Bulletin d'Histoire de l'Electricite, Actes de la Journee de la Femme et l'Electricite (1993).

93 92 PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

Thus, at each level, despite the effects of hyper-selection, the formal equality between men and women tends to disguise the fact that, other things being equal, women always occupy less favoured positions. For example, while it is true that women are more and more strongly represented among the employees of central and local government, it is always the lowest and most insecure positions that are reserved for them (there is a particularly high proportion of women among non-established and part-time staff, and in local government service, for example, they occupy junior and ancillary positions as assistants and 'carers' - cleaners, canteen staff, nursery assistants, etc.)P The clearest indication of the uncertainties of the status granted to women in the labour market is no doubt the fact that they are always paid less than men, other things being equal, that they are appointed to lower positions with the same qualifica­ tions, and above all that they are proportionately more affected by redundancies and insecurity of employment and more often relegated to part-time posts - which has the effect, among other things, of almost invariably excluding them from access to decision-making and career prospects. 24 Given that their inter­ ests are bound up with the 'left hand' of the state and 'social' positions within the bureaucratic field as well as with those sectors of private companies which are most vulnerable to 'flexible labour' policies, there is every reason to expect that they will be the main victims of the neoliberal policy aimed at reducing the welfare role of the state and favouring the 'dereg­ ulation' of the labour market.

The dominant positions, which they occupy in increasing numbers, largely lie in the dominated regions of the field of power, that is, in the domain of the production and circulation of symbolic goods (publishing, journalism, the media, teaching, etc.). These 'discriminated-against elites', as Maria Antonia

23 C£ M. Amine, Les Personnels tenitoriaux (Paris: Editions du CNFPT,

24 C£ M. Maruani, 'Feminisation et discrimination. Evolution de l'activite feminine en France', L'Orientation Scolaire et Pro/essionnel1e, 20, no. 3 (1991), pp. 243-56; 'Le mi-temps ou la porte', Le Monde des Debats, 1 (Oct. 1992), pp. 8-9; 'Statut social et mode d'emploi', Revue Frangaise de Sociologie, 30 (1989), pp. 31-9; 1. Laufer and A. Fouquet, 'Effet plafonnement de car­ riere des femmes cadres et acces a la decision dans la sphere economique', Rapport du Centre d'Etudes de l'Emploi, 97/90.

PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

Garcia de Leon calls them, have to pay for their 'elect' posi­ tions with a constant effort to satisfy the additional demands that are almost always placed on them and to banish all sexual connotation from their bodily hexis and their dress. 25

For a full understanding of the statistical distribution of powers and privileges between men and women and the way it has changed over time, one has to bear in mind, simultane­ ously, two properties which may at first sight appear contra­ dictory. On the one hand, whatever their position in the sodal space, women have in common the fact that they are separated from men by a negative symbolic coefficient which, like skin colour for blacks, or any other sign of membership of a stigmatized group, negatively affects everything that they are and do, and which is the source of a systematic set of homologous differ­ ences: despite the vast distance between them, there is some­ thing in common between a woman managing director who needs a massage every morning to give her the strength to cope with the stress of exercising power over men - or among men - and the woman production-line worker in the metal indus­ try who has to look to the solidarity of her female workmates for support against the ordeals of work in a male environment, such as sexual harassment, or, quite simply, the damage done to her self-image and self-esteem by the ugliness and dirt imposed by her working conditions. On the other hand, despite the specific experiences which bring them together (such as the small change of domination received in the coundess, often subliminal, wounds inflicted by the masculine order), women remain separated from each other by economic and cultural differences which affect, among other things, their objective and subjective ways of undergoing and suffering masculine domination without, however, cancelling out all that is linked to the diminution of symbolic capital entailed by being a woman.

For the rest, even the changes in the condition of women always obey the logic of the traditional model of the division between male and female. Men continue to dominate the public space and the field of power (especially economic power - over production) whereas women remain (predominantly)

25 Meynaud, 'l: acces au dernier cerde'.

95 94 PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

assigned to the private space (domestic space, the site of repro­ duction), where the logic of the economy of symbolic goods is perpetuated, or to those quasi-extensions of the domestic space, the welfare services ( especially medical services) and education, or to the domains of symbolic production (the literary, artistic or journalistic fields, etc.).

If the old structures of the sexual division seem still to deter­ mine the very direction and form of these changes, this is because, as well as being objectified in disciplines, careers and jobs that are more or less strongly characterized sexually, they act through three practical principles which women, and also their social circles, apply in their choices. The first is that the functions appropriate to women are an extension of their domestic functions - education, care and service. 26 The second is that a woman cannot have authority over men, and, other things being equal, therefore has every likelihood of being passed over in favour of a man for a position of authority and of being confined to subordinate and ancillary functions. The third principle gives men the monopoly of the handling of tech­ nical objects and machines.

Questioning adolescent girls about their experience at school, one cannot fail to be struck by the weight of the positive or negative incitements and injunctions of parents, teachers (especially careers advisers) and fellow pupils, who are always quick to remind them tacitly or explicitly of the destiny assigned to them by the traditional principle of division: thus, many of them observe that science teach­ ers encourage girls less than boys and that parents, like teachers and advisers, direct them 'in their own away from certain careers regarded as masculine ('When your father says "You'll never be able to do that job", it's really annoying'), whereas they encourage their brothers to choose them. But these reminders owe a large part of their efficacy to the fact that a whole series of previous experiences, par­ ticularly in sport, which often gives rise to experience of discrimina­ tion, has prepared them to accept such suggestions as foreshadowings

26 In a league table of 335 occupations according to the percentage of their members who are women, the top-ranking female jobs involve provision of services to children (child care and teaching), the sick (nurses, dieticians), households (cleaners and servants) and persons (secretaries, receptionists and 'bureaucratic domesticity') (see B. R. Bergman, The Economic Emergence of Work (New York: Bask Books, 1986), pp. 317ff.).

PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

and has made them internalize the dominant vision: they 'cannot see themselves giving orders to men', or, quite simply, working in a typi­ cally male occupation. The sexual division of tasks, inscribed in the objectivity of directly visible social categories, and the spontaneous interpretation of statistics which shapes the representation that each of us has of what is normal, have taught them that, as one of them put it in one of those wonderful tautologies in which the socially self­ evident expresses itself: 'These days, you don't see many women in men's jobs.'

In short, through the experience of a 'sexually' ordered social order and the explicit reminders addressed to them by their parents, teachers and peers, themselves endowed with princi­ ples of vision acquired in similar experiences of the world, girls internalize, in the form of schemes of perception and appreci­ ation not readily accessible to consciousness, the principles of the dominant vision which lead them to find the social order, such as it is, normal oreven natural and in a sense to anticipate their destiny, refusing the courses or careers from which they are anyway excluded and rushing towards those for which they are in any case destined. The constancy of habitus that results from this is thus one of the most important factors in the rel­ ative 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 dis­ course, to a large extent they are beyond the grip of conscious control and therefore not amenable to transformations or cor­ rections (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 objec­ tively orchestrated, they confirm and reinforce one another.

Furthermore, while refraining from attributing to men organ­ ized strategies of resistance, one can assume that the sponta­ neous logic of cooption, which always tends to conserve the rarest properties of social bodies, in the forefront of which is their sex ratio,27 is rooted in a confused, and emotionally very

27 Sometimes fairly 'miraculously', as in the case of the recruitment of higher-education teachers which was carried out in France to cope with

influx of students (see P. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity, pp. 120-58, esp. pp. 137-9).

97 96 PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

charged, apprehension of the threat that feminization poses for the rarity, and therefore the value, of a social position, and also, in some way, to the sexual identity of its occupants. The vio­ lence of some emotional reactions to the entry of women into a given occupation can be understood when one knows that social positions themselves are sexually characterized, and char­ acterizing, and that, in defending their jobs against feminiza­ tion, men are trying to protect their most deep-rooted idea of themselves as men, especially in the case of social categories such as manual workers or occupations such as those of the army, which owe much, if not all of their value, even in their own eyes, to their image of manliness. 28

The economy of symbolic goods and reproduction strategies

But another decisive factor in the perpetuation of differences is the permanence that the economy of symbolic goods (of which marriage is a central component) owes to its relative autonomy, which enables masculine domination to perpetuate itself within it unaffected by the transformations of the eco­ nomic modes of production and to do so aided by the con­ stant, explicit support that the family, the guardian of symbolic capital, receives from the churches and from law. The legiti­ mate exercise of sexuality, although it may appear increasingly freed from the matrimonial obligation, remains ordered by and subordinated to the transmission of the patrimony, through marriage, which remains one of the legitimate routes for the transfer of wealth. As Robert A. Nye endeavours to show, bour­ geois families have not ceased to invest in reproduction strat­ egies, especially matrimonial ones, aimed at conserving or increasing their symbolic capital. They do so much more than the aristocratic families of the ancien regime, because the main­ tenance of their position depends strongly on the reproduction

28 C£ C. L. Williams, Gender Differences at Work: Women and Men in Non· traditional Occupations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and M. Maruani and C. Nicole, Au labeur des dames. Mitiers masculins, emplois fiminins (Paris: Syros/Alternatives, 1989).

PERMANENCE AND CHANGE

of their symbolic capital through the production of inheritors capable of perpetuating the heritage of the group and through the acquisition of prestigious allies;29 and if, in modern France, the dispositions of the masculine point of honour have con­ tinued to regulate men's public activities, from duelling to eti­ quette or sport, this is because, as in Kabyle society, they did no more than manifest and realize the tendency of the (bour­ geois) family to perpetuate itself through the reproduction strategies imposed by the logic of the economy of symbolic goods, which, especially in the universe of the domestic economy, has maintained its specific demands, distinct from those which govern the overtly economic economy of the world of business.

Being excluded from the universe of serious things, of public and especially economic affairs, women long remained confined to the domestic universe and the activities associated with the biological and social reproduction of the lineage. Even if these activities (especially the maternal ones) are apparently recog­ nized and sometimes ritually celebrated, they are so only in so far as they remain subordinated to the activities of production, which alone receive a true economic and social sanction, and ordered in relation to the material and symbolic interests of the lineage, that is, of the men. Thus, a very large part of the domes­ tic work which falls to women is, in many milieux, aimed at conserving the solidarity and integration of the family by main­ taining kin relationships and all the social capital through the organization of a whole series of social activities - ordinary ones, such as meals which bring together the whole family,30 or extra-ordinary, such as the ceremonies and celebrations (birth­ days, etc.) designed to ritually celebrate the bonds of kinship and to ensure the maintenance of social relations and the prestige of the family, the exchanges of gifts, visits, letters or postcards and telephone calls. 3 !

29 R. A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 9. 30 We have seen the central role of meals in family life as organized by Mrs Ramsay, the incarnation of 'family spirit', whose death leads to the collapse of the collective life and unity of the household. 31 In the case of the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoiSie of the United States, this work of maintaining the family'S social capital, and therefore its unity, falls almost to the woman, who even looks after relationships with

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