ABSTRACT
Although Bourdieu clearly framed his thinking in terms of class, his social theory is also relevant to contemporary problematics of gender. It is indeed the issue of class that has made his work most appealing to feminist analyses. The significance of class has been demonstrated in the experiences of both sexual desire (Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989), and the performance of femininity and respectability among working-class women (Skeggs, 1997). Class-based judgements also inform experiences of motherhood (Reay, 1998; Lawler, 2000) and are deeply implicated in the educational strategies of parents, particularly mothers (Reay, 2004). Bourdieu (2001) himself ventured into a theoretical engagement with gender in his study of the power ofmasculinity. There he restated observations from his early Kabyle studies, emphasizing the naturalisation of a division of labour, which positions women as ‘objects’ of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 2001a: 99-100). This point was also rehearsed to argue that a structured sexual division of labour generates sexually differentiated perspectives on the world (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990b). But like other eminent male scholars, Bourdieu ignored much feminist work (see the discussion in Adkins, 2004; Skeggs, 2004; Silva, 2005; andLovell 2000).Distinction’s ‘blind spot’with respect to the analysis of gender is notorious. In a 600-page book, gender appeared onnumerous occasions (with ‘women’ being explicitly mentioned on only 27 pages!), and yet it was never subject to systematic analysis, even though the gendering of taste was a major concern of the book. Why is this so?
