Masculine Domination within colonial fields of power: thinking with and against Bourdieu and his feminist interlocutors

Dr Mark Johnson

Recent feminist engagements with Bourdieu’s masculine domination have found themselves in a paradoxical situation.  On the one hand, his notion of the habitus has been seen by many theorists of gender and sexuality to offer critical resources for thinking about embodiment and agency as active processes within ongoing struggles across a variety of social fields.  On the other hand, his one extended treatise of gender is at best deemed to lack the nuances and complexities of his other work and at worst seen as evidence of his underlying masculinist bias and structuralist metaphysics.  Thinking with and against Bourdieu and his feminist interlocutors I argue that what both fail to address or develop is a postcolonial perspective that situates embodiment and affective relations within translocal fields of power.

Bio

Dr. Mark Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull.  He has recently completed a major AHRC funded research project on gender and migration among the Filipino diaspora in Saudi Arabia.  Theoretically, he is interested in extending critically feminist engagements with Bourdieu through the development of a postcolonial, translocal social fields approach to the study of gender and sexuality. Recent publications include (with P. Werbner, eds.)  Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys: Ritual, Normativity and the Religious Imagination among International Asian Migrant Women, Special Double Issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (Sept. 2010) Vol. 11:3-4 and “Transgression and the Making of ‘Western’ Sexual Sciences”. in Transgressive Sex: subversion and control in erotic encounters (Donnan and Magowan, eds., Berghan, 2009).

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk