Bourdieu’s framework in Masculine Domination rejects another notion of Karl Marx – dialectical materialism. Even though Marx specifically was referring to the economic and social relations of material life in his theories, Marx believed that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (The German Ideology). Therefore, the material reality of life is not determined by thoughts and ideologies but rather these ideologies are a reflection and reaction to the material existence of people. If this material existence is extended to represent the physical world, Bourdieu here too rejects Marx and his idea that consciousness is a result of the way life is. Bourdieu subscribes to the conception that our physical existence is structured by the prevailing ideologies (through a domination that exists in embodiment). These ideologies, such as the division of labor, presuppose the physical reality.
“Thus the social definition of the sex organs, far from being a simple recording of natural properties, directly offered to perception, is the product of a construction implying a series of oriented choices…” (14).
In other words, our notion of physical reality is not an objective observation of the natural and physical world but rather it is an ever-changing physical world based upon an ever-changing system of ideologies (one however that has been consistently of domination). Bourdieu elaborates this point by demonstrating changing perceptions of the sexual organs through time. In the Middle Ages, surgeons viewed the vagina as an inverted phallus and abided by “the masculine principle” being “posited as the measure of all things” (14). But even though the masculine principle was the tool of measurement, man and woman were perceived as simply two variants of the same physiology and there were no anatomical terms to describe in detail the female genitals until the Renaissance as they were “represented as comprising the same organs as those of men, but differently organized” (15). We can see by this that no difference or distinction was made between the anatomical existence of man and woman, they were the same thing. However, the idea of the inverted phallus, of femaleness being inside, created notions and oppositions of up, down, positive, negative, passive, active are in result of trying to find in the “female body the justification of the social status that they assigned” to women (15).
Therefore the biological conceptions we hold today about the anatomical differences between men and women as an unquestionable, natural truth are not inherent ideas in the physical arrangement of the world. They are not natural, inevitable and they did not create the divisions of status in the world. We did not simply arrange the social distinctions between sexes upon the natural differences we observed (as these observable differences have always been changing). The physical, material world did not determine the ideologies that govern it. In turn, the “visible differences between male and female sex organs are a social construction which can be traced back to the principles of division of andocentric reason, itself grounded in the division of the social statuses assigned to men and women” (15). The division of labor, an ideology, a constructed concept has therefore determined our life, material and physical existence.
[…] (habitus) structure very interesting and worth the read. However, I’m not so happy about the second post. The title, Consciousness Determines Life, pretty much says it all: There’s an interpretation […]