Beyond habitus: researching gender and religion through the ontology of social relations

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Beyond habitus: researching gender and religion through the ontology

of social relations

Marta Trzebiatowska

N.B. For the final version of the chapter, please see:

McKinnon, A. & Trzebiatowska, M. (eds) (2014). Sociological Theory and the Question of Religion.

Ashgate.

Link: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409465522

Bourdieu and gender

Pierre Bourdieu needs no introduction. Since the 1990s his work has influenced social

scientists in his native France and internationally (Silva and Warde 2010) and he has become

a patron of collective intellectual endeavour ‘which disregards borders between disciplines

and countries’ (Wacquant in Truong and Weill 2012). He is mostly known for his writings on

education, class, consumption and art (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 for an excellent

overview) but in 1991 he wrote Masculine Domination, an essay which he later amended and

turned into a book (1998) and translated into English in 2001. The book was largely ignored

by feminists and had seemingly little impact on the ‘cottage industry’ that had grown around

Bourdieu’s work (King 2000: 417). The overall argument broadly reflects Bourdieu’s pre-

occupation with the role of power relations in maintaining the symbolic order, but in this

instance he zooms in on the question of the possibility of permanence and change in the

gender order in particular. The central question of Masculine Domination concerns the

historical mechanisms behind the relative universality and tenacity of the structures of gender

(Bourdieu, 2001: viii). Although his analysis is by no means novel in the eyes of feminist

scholars, the manner in which he arrives at his conclusions helps to understand the operation

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of the gender order in greater depth than if we simply stated that gender difference and

inequality are socially created and reproduced. In the course of building his argument

Bourdieu places particular emphasis on the amount of hard work that goes into presenting the

relationship between men and women as natural and ahistorical.0F

1 Social institutions – the

family, the church, the state, the educational system, the media – all contribute to creating the

illusion that the gender order is eternal, ahistorical and natural, therefore commonsensical and

‘just-so’. Bourdieu terms this commonsensical view of the world ‘doxa’ (2000: 15). What we

think is common sense, however, amounts to the outcome of our particular habitus - the

collection of experiences, beliefs and norms internalised throughout our lives, hence both

internal and external to us. Our habitus operates to match individual expectations to the

objective reality that surrounds us. The two are interconnected and difficult to disentangle.

Herein lies the paradox of the commonsensical view of gender too. It is surprising, remarks

Bourdieu, that most individuals do not question the order of gender and there are relatively

few transgressions and subversions, which is exactly how the order reproduces itself

effortlessly. Part of the reason for such a lack of subversion is the operation of symbolic

violence in its reproduction.1F

2 Bourdieu uses the concept of ‘symbolic violence’ to describe an

invisible, subtle coercion exerted over the dominated group. Masculine domination over

women operates successfully thanks to the ‘paradox of doxa’ – the surprising ease with which

the order of the world as we know it reproduces itself without any significant difficulty

(Bourdieu 2001). The trouble with challenging masculine domination is that even when

explicitly trying to do so women end up drawing on the very ‘modes of thought that are the

product of domination’ (Bourdieu 2001: 5). The only way of breaking the cycle of

1 This work has been described by gender scholars as ‘doing gender’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987), ‘performativity’ (Butler, 1990), but Bourdieu’s analysis goes beyond interactionism and micro-level explanation because he positions gender scripts in the wider field of objective social relations. 2 Bourdieu has been heavily criticised for presenting gender divisions as fixed and simplistic and ignoring the challenges to the status quo from several generations of feminist activists and academics (see Lovell 2003)

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reproduction is to treat masculine domination as ‘at once familiar and exotic’ (Bourdieu

2001: 5).

Bourdieu uses his early ethnography of the Kabyle society in Algeria to demonstrate the

operation of the symbolic gender order (1979). Amongst the Kabyles male and female

characteristics are organised as a set of oppositions that define one another (up/down,

straight/curved, dry/wet) (2001: 6). The distinction between the sexes is present not only in

the bodies and behaviour of men and women but also in the objective social world because

mundane everyday objects are accorded masculine or feminine characteristics. For example,

every part of the house is labelled as either masculine or feminine. Thus, the masculine,

androcentric order is presented as neutral and in no need of justification. As women mobilise

these dominant schemes of perception, they also internalise their submission and form a view

of feminine sexuality that is negative and inferior to its masculine counterpart. Consequently,

the symbolic gender order is constructed and legitimated through both: the objective division

and subjective cognitive schemes. But gender does not exist in a vacuum. Femininity and

masculinity necessarily operate relationally because the feminine and the masculine cannot

be understood without reference to each other. The formative process of gendering bodies,

Bourdieu stresses, is not entirely conscious but rather achieved through everyday division of

labour and rituals all aimed at encouraging the development of appearance and behaviour

deemed appropriate for one’s gender. Repetition brings the gender order into being (Butler

1990). And so this gender 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 and style’ (Bourdieu 2001: 27). As a result of this tacit operation of the gender order,

neither men nor women fully realise the degree to which they reproduce the relationship of

domination through their everyday actions. Even when women draw on strategies to

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undermine this relationship, they usually end up further reinforcing the androcentric view.

Their own tools of resistance are rooted in the very symbols and myths that they try to

undermine: ‘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’ (Bourdieu 2001: 32). Bourdieu further illustrates this point

through an example of French women’s preference with regard to future husbands. Surveys

demonstrate that a high percentage of French women express a desire for a man taller and

older than they are (two thirds explicitly reject shorter men) (2001: 36). In this case the

objective schemes of perception and the subjective preferences coalesce and become difficult,

if not impossible, to disentangle. Love, in this scenario, ‘is often partly amor fati, love of

one’s social destiny’ (Bourdieu 2001: 37). Interestingly, the desired age gap between a

woman and a man decreases as the woman’s independence increases and marriage ceases to

be a means of achieving a higher social status, which shows that there is no inevitability

about the gender order. Once women have gained access to professional avenues of mobility

in the public sphere, ‘erotic capital’ (Hakim 2011) quickly becomes redundant. Therefore,

according to Bourdieu, the only way to understand symbolic violence as exercised by men

over women is to move beyond constraint and consent (between mechanical coercion and

voluntary submission) and focus on understanding symbolic domination as exerted through

the schemes of perception and action that are constitutive of habitus and which operate below

the level of conscious decisions and thus ‘set up a cognitive relationship that is profoundly

obscure to itself’ (Bourdieu 2001: 37). The interaction between masculine domination and

feminine submissiveness can only be understood by examining 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’ (Bourdieu 2001: 38). In order to operate successfully

symbolic violence needs to be met half-way by the individuals involved and this is only

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possible if they have performed the (embodied) efforts necessary for the production of these

‘durable dispositions’ (Bourdieu 2001: 38).

The dominated co-produce their own domination by acting in accordance with the

expectations of the dominant. Bourdieu gives examples of embodied emotions and

sentiments, such as shame or respect, to illustrate this point (2001: 39). Simply being aware

of the expectations and the manner in which they are met does nothing to displace the

mechanism of submission because it is so deeply embedded into the individual’s

consciousness and bodily actions. The body, and the gendered and sexual body, is a container

and a vessel for the habitus (internalised dispositions and experiences) (Krais 2006).To put it

simply, the excluded exclude themselves naturally and effortlessly as a result of the

‘somatization of the relation of power’ (Bourdieu 2001: 56).2F

3

Bourdieu is very conscious of the dangers inherent in suggesting that women participate in

reinforcing their own submission (2001:114). This not only victimises women further but

also can serve as an excuse for men’s actions. Of course, Bourdieu does not mean to suggest

that women actively choose to be submissive, are their worst enemies, or enjoy the

domination. The durability and relative strength of the structures of domination lies in the

subtle operation of symbolic power which can only be exercised with the contribution from

those at the receiving end, and they are only at the receiving end because they are complicit

in the construction of the relationship. In a sense, Bourdieu’s analysis of the gender order is a

version of the Hegelian master-and-slave dialectic, also famously mobilised by Simone de

Beauvoir in her seminal writings on gender relations (1953). The cognitive structures drawn

on by both the dominant and the dominated are socially constructed but even the act of

3 Interestingly, women’s own contribution to their objective subordination has received a lot of public attention and coverage due to the publication of books such as Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (Sandberg 2013) and Honey Money: the Power of Erotic Capital (Hakim 2011). While these books are highly controversial in their claims about gender inequalities, they indicate a shift in both, the place of women in public sphere and their perception of it.

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construction is the effect of power (Bourdieu 2001: 40). Symbolic efforts to raise

consciousness among the dominated is not sufficient because the conditions in place are too

strongly inscribed in bodies, so the only way to alter the effects of symbolic violence is to

change the conditions of its production (Bourdieu 2001: 41). As Bourdieu describes it:

‘…a relation of domination that functions only through the complicity of dispositions

depends profoundly, for its perpetuation or transformation, on the perpetuation of

transformation of the structures of which those dispositions are the product’ (2001: 42)

There is no danger of women defying the collective expectations and thus challenging the

gender order because their dispositions are so perfectly attuned to the objective expectations.

The very position of the dominant makes it possible to render their view of reality universal

and therefore very difficult to challenge (Bourdieu 2001: 62).3F

4 This explains why in some

religions women would not attempt to gain access to the positions of power. The positions in

question ‘are tailor-made for men’ and so the mismatch between dispositions and objective

conditions ‘naturally’ prevents transgression (Bourdieu, 2001: 63). The harsh reality of this

gender order then is that women are simultaneously tools and assets in the production of

symbolic and social capital in male power struggles (Bourdieu, 2001: 44). This is evidenced

most clearly in social norms with regard to honour and nowhere is this more obvious than in

traditionally religious groups where women perform morality on behalf of men and preserve

the collective honour of the community through monitoring their behaviour and reputation.

Women’s honour becomes perceived as ‘a fetishized measure of masculine reputation’

(Bourdieu, 2001: 45). This is achieved partly, if not fully, through the construction,

representation and experience of the female body as ‘body-for-others’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 63).

Bourdieu points out that for being interpellated to partake in the masculine ‘games of honour’

4 Some commentators found Bourdieu’s argument patronising towards women (see, for example, Wallace 2003)

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and to assert masculinity constantly is also a burdensome duty and a ‘trap’ (2001: 50). He

gives the impression that the demands imposed on men by their particular habitus produce

their own version of insecurities, especially that manliness is always judged against

femininity and has to be legitimated by other men in the community. Femininity, therefore,

symbolises a threat to the successful achievement of the masculine status, which necessarily

makes the accomplishment of masculinity relational – fashioned in direct opposition to what

it is not.

Feminist Critique of Masculine Domination

To say that Masculine Domination met with a cool reception on the part of feminists and

gender studies scholars would be a gross understatement. Initially, the essay was ignored

altogether and subsequently a number of criticisms were levelled at Bourdieu, most of which

could be subsumed under the general label of ‘the collective androcentric unconscious’ (Witz

2004: 212). I will now turn to these criticisms and then make a case for the particular

usefulness of Masculine Domination for the study of religion and gender.

First, Bourdieu defines gender as a set of mutually exclusive characteristics rooted in sexual

difference. This is problematic because it overlooks the fundamental distinction between sex

and gender which is at the root of feminist understanding of gendered identities as socially

constructed (Mottier 2002: 351). Focusing on difference obscures the role of power in the

production of gendered individuals. Combining gender difference with a conceptualisation of

power relations would provide a much more convincing basis for Bourdieu’s theory of

symbolic violence and misrecognition (Mottier 2002: 351). Second, mobilising a pre-modern,

agrarian society, such as Kabylia, as a template to extrapolate from, is not helpful because it

implies that modernisation is a uniform process that can only unfold in one way, and that this

model of the gender order itself is internally stable and reproducible in other contexts

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(Mottier, 2002). The gender order appears unrealistic because it is so neatly laid out (Krais,

2006). Third, Bourdieu insists on the importance of public institutions as the key engines of

enactment and reproduction of masculine domination, while the private sphere of the home

acts only as a site of manifestation of gendered power relations. This flies in the face of the

feminist claim that ‘the personal is political and thus shuts off a whole segment of social life

where gender inequalities are played out and experienced in mundane lived realities of

women and men (Mottier 2002: 352). Fourth, Bourdieu’s account of structure and agency

‘lacks a strong concept of subjectivity’ (Mottier 2002: 354). Subjectivity is central to feminist

theory and research because it opens the door to the formation of critical agency which, in

turn, leads to structural transformations in the gender order. Bourdieu places too much

emphasis on the permanence and inflexibility of masculine domination and gives too little

credit to the potential for change in the gender order. Although he does pay heed to

developments, such as women’s entry into the labour market, or alternative models of family

and sexualities, he insists on the traditional structures’ continuing influence over these

changes (Mottier 2002: 353). Fifth, Bourdieu constructs the gender order as a binary of the

dominant versus the dominated, which presents both domination and power as homogenous,

internally uniform states. By extension, such a reading also sees political interests as

undifferentiated (Mottier 2002: 355). Moreover, he sees femininity and masculinity as clear-

cut and neatly defined categories, rather than internally contradictory and pluralistic social

scripts on a continuum of genders (Paechter 2006). In other words, Bourdieu’s

conceptualisation of masculine domination and potential for generative agency is marred by

the absence of nuance and complexity and he appears oblivious to the work of his feminist

colleagues, which in itself may suggest to some that he is indeed the product of his own

masculine habitus, and not as ‘epistemologically vigilant’ as he aspires to being (Fowler

2003; Lovell 2002; Witz, 2004; Krais, 2006: 124).

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Probably the most consistent criticism of Bourdieu’s work in general, and his theory of

masculine domination in particular, is this of determinism (e.g. Jenkins, 1993; Alexander,

1995; Schatzki, 1997). Habitus determines individual agency and thus precludes any

challenge to the status quo. As a consequence, masculine domination is portrayed as rigid and

implacable, despite the significant gains of the feminist movement and the subsequent shifts

in the gender order. The remainder of this chapter examines Bourdieu’s ‘practical theory’ as

the antidotum for this determinism and gives concrete examples from research on religion,

gender and sexuality where the ontology of social relations rooted in collective practices (and

not the idea of a lone individual facing her or his habitus) is the key tool for sociological

analysis (King 2004).

Even those feminist critics who find some merit in and offer a sympathetic reading of

Masculine Domination tend to focus on the concept of the habitus at the expense of

Bourdieu’s theory of action (see Dillabough, 2010; Fowler, 2003; Krais, 2006; Mottier,

2002), which creates an incomplete and somewhat misleading representation of his ideas.

Obviously, Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of agency is inseparable from habitus as the two are

mutually susceptible but following King (2000; 2004) I will argue that instead of separating

habitus and practice, one can see the former as simply a reification of ‘particular moments in

the social process which consists [...] of individuals interacting meaningfully with other

individuals’ (King 2000: 431). Social action is intersubjective but not individualistic because

it relies on shared understandings and, as such, it is never an isolated act performed by a lone

Sartrean individual. This line of thought is developed in the next section.

Beyond structure and agency: critical hermeneutics in the study of religion and gender

Contemporary social theorists can be seen as divided into two camps which foster two

distinct approaches to society (King 2004). Both are dualistic in nature, i.e. social reality is

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understood as a combination of structure and agency. Whether structure is defined as a set of

rules, or as objective institutions, society is always explained as the interaction between

structure and agency. However, this social ontology is untenable: structure is nothing more

than social relations based on shared understandings and to assume its epiphenomenal status

is to commit an error because ‘in every case, structure can be reduced to social relations’

(King 2004: 84).

According to Krais (2006), the reason why Bourdieu’s writings on gender have been

misconstrued is that they are understood in the context of a very particular theory of

socialization and social roles. If social roles are seen as imposed externally and simply acted

out, they become normative restrictions, leaving no room for reflexivity and agency (Krais

2006: 125). When an individual takes on a role, she becomes involved in a set of structural

conditions, not just ‘other people’s subjective expectations’ (Archer, 2000: 468). Thus, the

act of marriage implies compliance to legal rules, which agents are aware of, yet their

awareness does not create those rules. The legal system pre-exists the individuals who decide

to marry, thus it is autonomous and independent of them. However, one could argue that for

those individuals to marry, everyone else needs to be in agreement on what marriage entails!

Marriage as a legal institution might have been created in the past, yet it does not make it

autonomous of social actors in the present. Catholics may well be aware of the difficulties of

obtaining an annulment and thus be forced to make a choice between remaining a legitimate

member of the Church or re-marrying, but the reason why it is so is not some superior and

autonomous force. It is purely other people who have a common understanding of the laws

within the Catholic Church. Those laws have been created, reproduced and modified through

human interaction. Thus, whilst they might be autonomous with respect to one particular

agent, they can be reduced to series of interactions between groups of individuals. Similarly,

an Orthodox Jewish woman can choose to divorce her husband but in the eyes of the Jewish

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law, if her husband does not agree to the divorce, she is still legally married to him.4F

5 A

Catholic nun’s symbolic marriage to Jesus may be regarded as ludicrous by unsympathetic

lay observers because they do not share the understanding of its validity. However, it makes

perfect sense to her fellow sisters. Similarly, a Buddhist nun’s renunciation of marriage may

be equated with social failure because of the collective understanding of what it means to be a

woman in Taiwanese society (see Crane 2004).

It is a ‘solipsistic error’ to reduce the explanation of the social structure to the

commonsensical perspective of a single individual, i.e. the individual experience (King

1999a:217). Undeniably, individual experience matters. Nevertheless, it is only through

interaction with other people that we learn how to meet those social expectations and this is

the vital condition for the individual to develop his or her self. Humans draw on available

stocks of knowledge in order to make sense of their own (religious and gendered) experience.

If we view the individual as facing external, autonomous reality instead of social context

which is nothing more than ‘interacting networks of individuals’ (King 1999a: 219), we end

up with the notion of society and the (single) individual, not society and a plurality of

individuals. One person’s action is only made meaningful through their interactions with

other members of the group. To render action meaningful, an individual must assign it a

meaning by referring to the collectively shared understandings, not their individual

perspective.5F

6 The danger of prioritising habitus over practice and positing it as autonomous

5 The state of limbo referred to as ‘agunah’ – a ‘chained woman’. If an ‘agunah’ remarries and has children, they are not considered legitimate and the marriage regarded as invalid in the eyes of the Jewish law (Glicksman 2006: 300-302)

6 Opponents of this view would argue that interpretive sociologists commit the ‘epistemic fallacy’ - confusing the knowledge of reality with the way reality is (see Archer 2000: 469)). The interpretive tradition is solipsistic in its account of the social world because it somehow grants individuals permission to make whatever they wish of social reality as long as their understanding can be somehow co-ordinated with this of other people. Nonetheless, such a critique fails to acknowledge the fact that this common understanding constitutes the constraint the interpretive theory points to and that it is produced during interaction, not co-ordinated prior to it. The world is not disallowed any role as a regulator of the assertions that can be made about it, however the

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of social relations is that it leads to excusing social inequalities like poverty by presenting

them as objective, therefore nobody’s responsibility (King, 1999a: 222). Similarly, if we

argue that an individual faces God and his choices in every stage of their life, we can easily

slip into assuming a fatalistic account of agency that very much resembles Bourdieu’s ‘love

of destiny’. Things are so and not otherwise because the habitus is so and not otherwise and

there is nothing we can do about it except embrace it and make the most of it. This is not to

deny the existence of ‘background conditions which cannot be reduced to their micro

dimensions’ (King 1999a: 223). We may well use the term ‘structure’ to describe these

conditions but only if by structure we mean the interactions of a variety of people in different

historical times and locations, and not a god-like metaphysical entity which hovers above

individuals ‘or is more than the sum of all individuals and their interactions’ (King, 1999a:

223).This understanding of structure, as exhibited in the concept of habitus, is beneficial for

the study of religion and gender because it allows us to see both as embedded in mutually

sustained social relations and understandings of particular social groups. Such an interpretive

approach to social reality makes it possible to understand God as a relational concept,

contained within society, rather than beyond it. This does not entail ignoring people’s beliefs

in abstract powers but it does point to a sociologically valid account of the divine. As belief is

central to the study of religious groups and individuals, it cannot be dismissed, but the

emphasis should be on how the divine is drawn upon by individuals in the context of their

groups, communities and in relation to non-religious fields.

Studying religion and gender with (and against) Bourdieu

major constraint and regulator of what can and cannot be asserted about the world is the social context, which is the sum of interactions between individuals (King 1999a: 220).

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Gender and sexuality are two of the most obvious social divisions and social markers

of division. Gender is omnipresent and dictates the rule of identity and engagement in all

social situations to a large extent. The difficulty of studying gender lies in its simultaneous

rigidity and fluidity, which are both contextual. In the manner of a chemical substance that

changes when coming into contact with other substances, gender manifests itself differently

depending on the social situation but, unlike many social roles, it never entirely disappears

from view, or loses its relevance. Therefore, the act of ‘doing gender’ can be best described

as ‘extending an analogy’, not as acting out a gender rule as an isolated individual (Barnes

1995:55). Gender order is a self-fulfilling prophecy on a large scale: ordered and yet open to

a wide variety of interpretations within the constraints of ‘regulated liberties’ (Bourdieu

1991: 102). Religion is a social structure which both affects and is affected by gender. The

relationship is this of mutual susceptibility, which makes it particularly difficult to analyse

because we are dealing with two social properties that are both relatively stable and yet in the

state of constant flux.

There are several possibilities for the interaction between gender and religion: religions

remain overwhelmingly male-dominated, with women leaving at a fast pace; women gain

access to positions of power and authority but religious institutions become feminised at all

levels; new forms of spirituality are set up by women and for women (for example, the

overwhelming majority of women in holistic spiritualities as shown by Heelas and Woodhead

2005). The potential for wide structural changes comes from the internal inconsistencies and

contradictions in the individuals’ own biographies and in the system they inhabit. Mere

awareness of gender divisions and inequalities in religion will not suffice to effect

transformation, however. Collective efforts, not individual action, lead to gradual

transformation of seemingly monolithic structures. The women who engage in subversive

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practices in private make a difference to their personal lives but their actions only count if

they have tangible social consequences.

Paradoxically, the sociological critique of heteronormativity means that sexual identities and

experiences that fall into the realm of the socially normative are presented as relatively

unproblematic and thus remain unexplored (Smart 1996; Jackson 1999; van Hooff 2011).

Sonya Sharma’s work fills this gap to a certain extent. Her elegantly written and data-rich

book Good Girls, Good Sex (2011) explores the constant negotiation between oppression and

liberation which young Protestant women engage in on a daily basis. Her study is notable for

its focus on (predominantly) heterosexual Christian women and shows the struggle between

religious values and personal lives. Sharma’s research participants highlighted the power of

accountability to their religious tradition, as well as to their fellow Christians, that can

provide a comfortable buffer against the over-sexualised and secular mainstream society. At

the same time this accountability restricts their individual sexual freedom and choices.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this study is the evident difficulty of separating religious

and sexual identities – the two are locked together and mutually susceptible against the wider

background of the church community. This is where Bourdieu’s concept of ‘split habitus’

(habitus clivé) becomes a useful tool of analysis. As social identities are fashioned out of a

whole range of, often contradictory, experiences, so the habitus is made up of conflicting

elements (Bennett 2007). The young Christian women described in Sharma’s study, are

acutely aware of the inequalities and injustices of some religious structures and institutions,

and yet constituted by them at the same time. All the ingredients necessary for the persistence

of the androcentric order are in place: the idea of being a good Christian girl is deeply

internalised in the bodily hexis and safeguarded by feelings of shame and guilt; symbolic

violence is exercised by the women themselves as they monitor their thoughts during sexual

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encounters and punish their bodies afterwards (one of Sharma’s interviewees self-harmed

after sexual encounters as a means of purification); and masculine domination is preserved

and reinforced by the women in the church community (Sharma 2011: 52-67). A particularly

poignant example of the power of communal accountability is the way in which young

women police their own behaviour in anticipation of being scrutinised by others. ‘A Christian

leader said that she could tell if a girl had had sex, just by the way she carried herself.

Whether or not this was true, it caused me to monitor my behaviour lest it be questioned

otherwise’, confessed one of Sharma’s young participants (2011: 53). Others recall feelings

of guilt accompanying sexual encounters, even those within marriage, and having to ‘unlearn

the shame’ associated with sex (Sharma 2011: 69). It is clear from Sharma’s study that the

interaction between religion and gender in this case is not driven by an overarching social

structure but by collective norms that are drawn upon and enacted by real individuals in

everyday life scenarios. In particular, the concepts of shame and ‘good versus bad Christian

girl’ operate in exactly the same way as honour games among the Kabyles. Shame is not

something the individual woman experiences independently of the community she is part of.

But neither is this shame unchallenged in light of changing circumstances. Sharma cites an

amusing and revealing anecdote of an attempt to combine Christianity and female expression

of sexuality in a religiously acceptable manner where a husband buys his wife a Bible and a

vibrator for her birthday (2011: 86). The combination of these two seemingly incompatible

items created consternation for the ‘good Christian girl’ but also demonstrates how the rules

dictated by her habitus can be manipulated and interpreted to accommodate the social

changes in women’s view of their own sexuality. If masculine domination was as rigid as the

concept of the habitus implies and women ‘imbibed androcentric values’ unreflexively

(Grenfell 2004: 181), this scenario would be impossible. In a way, Bourdieu understates the

role of reflexivity in the structuring of the habitus, except for allowing it in rare instances of

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crisis when the synchronicity between the habitus and the field is disturbed (1977: 83; 1990:

108). However, if we see the constraint not in habitus as a structure but rather in the shared

communal agreement that is necessarily open to renegotiation and subtle alteration, change in

the religious shaping of the gender order becomes a possibility.

Shereen El Feki’s exploration of sexual lives in Egypt provides even more instructive

examples of the centrality of social relations to the study of religion and gender (2013). El

Feki offers a complex and multi-faceted account of the negotiations and changing values in a

society that continues to be governed by strict, in comparison to western standards, religious

rules and regulations. While premarital sex is strictly forbidden by the Qur’an, Egyptian men

and women find ingenious ways of circumventing the obstacles by, amongst other things,

using the Internet for ‘virtual cruising’ (El Feki 2013: 101), or entering pleasure marriages

(zawaj mut’a) which have a time-limit and serve the purpose of legitimising sexual practices

outside of official marriage (El Feki 2013: 43). However, the power of masculine domination

exercised through strong communal understandings of female honour and respectability

produces different consequences of such negotiations for men and women. Unsurprisingly, it

is the women who pay the heaviest price for departing from the gender order because their

honour is ‘like a match; it only lights once’ (El Feki 2013: 93). Thus, while for men such

deviations from the rule remain acceptable on the whole and rarely influence their life in the

long run, women have to resort to behind-the-scenes practices that re-light the match of

honour in public. Hymen repair is considered shameful and costly in Egypt but at the same

time gynaecologists who perform the surgeries are sympathetic toward young women looking

for help because they are aware of the social consequences for ‘unrepaired’ brides (El Feki

2013: 117). The point I am trying to make here is that the sheer complexity of the relationship

between religion and the gender order in a place like modern-day Egypt clearly demonstrates

that it is the virtuoso agency of those involved in shaping the social order that is the key to

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understanding the nature of social reality. If we wished to explain the manipulations of these

rules by referring to the habitus as mechanically imposing itself on individuals, no such

manipulation would be possible in the first place because habitus ‘insists on a complete fit

between the individual’s practices and his objective circumstances’ (King 2000: 430). The

case of sexual negotiation in Egypt shows that we are dealing with skilful social actors who

have at their disposal a wide array of courses of action but they are guided by their sense of

what is appropriate in light of their group membership. For example, the decision of whether

to perform hymen repair on a young female patient is not determined by the religious, or even

cultural habitus. The practitioner improvises on the spot because her knowledge of her own

social context is so profound that she can easily accommodate unforeseen contingencies.

Toward an ontology of social relations in the study of gender and religion

Pierre Bourdieu’s work on gender does not suggest itself automatically as a useful framework

for studying the intersection of religion, gender and sexuality. Indeed, there is a wealth of

theoretical approaches by gender scholars who may be better suited to the task. However, I

believe that Bourdieu’s theory of masculine domination and his general approach to

analysing power relations can help us understand the possibility of change in the gender

order, as well as the reasons for its relative durability and rigidity. For this to happen,

however, every historical period needs to be examined separately to establish

‘the system of agents, and institutions – family, church, state, educational system, etc., which,

with different weights and different means at different times, have helped to remove the

relations of masculine domination more or less completely from history’(Bourdieu 2001: 83).

Late modern world is complex and women are both objects and subjects who participate in

the political struggle. This is why Bourdieu’s theory of practice constitutes a fruitful approach

to studying gender relations in religious fields. Moving away from the habitus to collectively

259

created practices and agency of female, male (and other) virtuosi goes some way to produce a

more convincing and all-encompassing account of gender and religion in late modernity.

Habitus can be understood as transcending the individual/structure dualism but only in the

sense that individuals are active in the world where structure refers to nothing more than the

historically positioned interactions between groups of individuals in possession of various

amounts of capital, competing in fields of social life where symbolic violence is exercised but

also resisted and challenged. Curiously, Bourdieu finishes Masculine Domination with a

utopian postscript on love as a liberating force from oppression and extreme individualism.

He posits love as the exception ‘to the law of masculine domination’ (Bourdieu 2001: 109)

and a salvation of sorts for both the dominant and the dominated. Engaging in the act of

loving requires both individuals to eschew the relationship of domination and come together

in ‘an act of free alienation that is definitely asserted’ through uttering ‘I love you’ (Bourdieu

2001: 112). This postscript could be read as patronising and utopian because Bourdieu

ignores the fact that ‘being in love’ itself is never a neutral act that happens outside dominant

discourses and scripts on intimate relationships. On the other hand, the passage also points to

the universal human potential for collective creation of the Durkheimian ‘soul’ and

subsequent re-definition of situations individuals find themselves in. The task of researching

the intersection of gender, sexuality and religion poses a number of difficulties because all

elements continuously shift internally and in relation to one another in a manner of images in

a kaleidoscope. In order produce a most complete and balanced account of such shifts, we

must pay attention to the sum of historical interactions between the parts, instead of assuming

a reified structure that rules over and determines all of them.

260

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