ABSTRACT
In the field of cultural production, "symbolic capital" denotes the prestige, honor, or consecration that a given artifact, person, or activity gains within a specific domain. Cultural capital is profoundly affected and partially determined by an individual's familial and educational background and class position. By disassociating feminine writing from the writing of women, postmodernist scholarship, much like modernist criticism, avoids confronting the discrepancies in power and value between the cultural production of men and women. Griselda Pollock employs feminist post-structuralist and Marxian methodologies to reveal that art can be understood solely as a symbolic production within specific socio-economic and cultural relations. This chapter aims to develop the lines of interrogation of the central assumptions of modernist and postmodernist aesthetic practices by relying upon Pollock's feminist and Pierre Bourdieu's Marxian analyses of the gender and class power relations which help construct the so-called purely "aesthetic" field of cultural production.
