ABSTRACT
The chapter starts with an outline of the most important positive references to Bourdieusian scholarship formulated within gender studies (including the studies of men and masculinities). Next, the principal claims of Masculine Domination, Bourdieu’s only book on masculinity, are scrutinised. This book demonstrates several virtues and limitations of Bourdieu’s thinking. The following section summarises four types of critique levelled against this book: (1) the text lacks adequate empirical grounds for the statements; (2) the author is “deterministic” and “pessimistic”; (3) Bourdieu fails to refer to gender studies literature and completely ignores studies of men and masculinities; (4) Bourdieu extends his paradigm of the displacement of the social structure to the displacement of the men/women relationship. However, it is concluded that, despite such criticism, the inclusion of a Bourdieusian conceptual framework might benefit studies of men and masculinities on several counts. By using the notions of habitus, capital, symbolic violence and social field, the plurality of masculinities can be conceptualised as a system of relations among masculine dispositions both within and between fields.
