Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice by Clare Chambers Page B

the impression that gender norms can easily be resisted. Indeed, the explicit message is often that such norms cannot be re- sisted at all. In passages that echo Shulamith Firestone’s claim that ‘‘no matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere,’’ 38 Bourdieu describes how women are ‘‘condemned’’ to participate in the symbolic violence of gender, 39 and ‘‘cannot fail’’ to adhere to structures and agents of domi- nation. 40 Moreover, the only strategies that women have to overcome male domination are deeply problematic, requiring women to efface themselves and thus confirm ‘‘the dominant representation of women as maleficent beings.’’ 41 It seems we must conclude, with Bourdieu, that ‘‘ all the conditions for the full exercise of male domination are thus combined.’’ 42
    It is easy to see, then, how the reader could find herself sympathetic to what McNay calls the ‘‘common criticism of Bourdieu’s work’’ 43 — namely, its implications of determinism—despite Bourdieu’s frequent denials. As Lovell puts it, Bourdieu’s work ‘‘is at times bleakly pessi- mistic.’’ 44 Resisting symbolic violence seems almost impossible on Bourdieu’s analysis, as its structures of dominance reach so deeply into the understanding. If we can perceive the world only through such structures, where will we find the material from which to construct an alternative consciousness? If women have only the cognitive instru- ments of patriarchy, how can we theorize feminism?
    These determinist implications have some truth: gender norms can- not be overcome by a ‘‘simple’’ act of will alone. For example, knowing that we wear makeup because there are significant pressures on us to do so, and regretting that fact as it renders us objectified, is not enough
Shulamith Firestone, ‘‘The Dialectic of Sex,’’ 90.
Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 30, 32.
Ibid., 35; see also Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 170.
Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 32.
Ibid. , 33; emphasis added.
McNay, ‘‘Gender, Habitus and the Field,’’ 100.
Lovell, ‘‘Thinking Feminism,’’ 27.

    to stop us from deriving at least some pleasure from selecting and applying it. However, parts of Bourdieu’s analysis also imply that it will be difficult if not impossible for us even to conceptualize radical change, for he asserts that women living under patriarchy lack the cog- nitive resources to do so. 45 Such a conclusion is problematic for it seems to rule out social change and conflicts with the fact that change does occur, sometimes as the result of radical theorizing, for example, of feminists about and against patriarchy.

    Consciousness-Raising and Reflexivity

    For MacKinnon, consciousness-raising is fundamental to feminism: it is feminism’s method. 46 Precisely because gender and gender hierar- chy are socially constructed phenomena, it is necessary for feminists to attempt to deconstruct them, via consciousness-raising. Moreover, the fact that women are themselves partially constituted by the sym- bolic violence of gender makes consciousness-raising not less effective, as Bourdieu argues, but more effective:

    Feminist method as practiced in consciousness raising, taken as a theory of knowing about social being, pursues another epistemology. Women are presumed able to have access to so- ciety and its structure because they live in it and have been formed by it, not in spite of those facts. . . . Feminist epistemol- ogy asserts that the social process of being a woman is on some level the same process as that by which woman’s conscious- ness becomes aware of itself as such and of its world. Mind and world, as a matter of social reality, are taken as interpene- trated. 47

    It is not the case, MacKinnon asserts, that the social construction of dominated individuals prevents them from conceptualizing their dom- ination. Whereas Bourdieu’s account of