ABSTRACT

Gender studies have given new perspectives to the classical issue, with a new importance given to the dichotomy of domination/resistance. Cultural studies opens a new research programme for sociology, with new attention paid to everyday life practices, "micro" or "infra" politics and "history from below". These alternatives between structure and agency or between domination and emancipation are not limited to cultural studies or to social theory in Britain or United States. In French sociology of culture, for instance, Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron, in Le savant et le populaire, wanted to bring some nuance to the classical Bourdieu's La Distinction. The concept of agency could help us to break with the fatalistic and deterministic character of studies about domination. The continued acceptance of domestic constraints and the fact that even women with gender awareness consent "to reproduce this asymmetrical relationship" is often understood as an "enigma".