Att erövra Bourdieu

Abstract

Tliis article is about appropriating Pierre Bourdicn for feminist theory. This means a critical assessment of a given theory formation with a view to taking it over and using it for feminist purposes. Only recently, Bourdieu has found an audience outside the social sciences in the English-speaking world. One of the reasons for this belated interdisciplinary interest is surely the fact that his resolntely sociological and historical thought (classical french sociology, structuralism and marxism), could find little resonance in a theoretical space dominated, in the humanities at least, by poststructuralism and postmodernism. Today, however, there is a renewed interest in the social and historical determinants of cultural production. The fact that Bourdieu has always devoted much space to problems pertaining to literature, language and aesthetics makes his work particularly promising terrain for literary critics. His theory allows feminists to produce highly concrete and specific analyses of the social determinants of the literary énonciation. This is not to say that such determinants are the only ones that we need to consider, nor that feminist critics should not concern themselves with the énoncé, or the actual statement itself. In this article 1 hope to show that a Bourdieuian approach enables us to reconceptualize gender as a social category in a way which undercuts the traditional essentialist/nonessentialist devide. In reading with Bourdieu Héléne Cixous's highly influential essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" can be analysed as an effort to snub Simone de Beauvoir, a deliberate challenge to the doyenne of French feminism, and, more specifically, as Cixous's bid for power - legitimacy - within the field of French feminism. Implicitly casting Beauvoir as orthodox, Cixouss defiant exclusion of the author of The Second Sex in her essay signals her need to erase a figure she perceives as the powerful and censorious origin of her own discourse.