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Theory, Culture & Society
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Gender, Sociological Theory and Bourdieu’s Sociology of Practice

Beate Krais

Free University of Berlin, Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education

While feminist sociology has succeeded in being recognized as a legitimate field of sociological research (yet mainly as a limited field within the broader discipline), its core objective - namely, to reconfigure the discipline, instating gender as a central analytic category - has not yet been achieved. This article argues that Bourdieu's sociology of practice offers a theoretical framework for fundamentally reconstructing sociology to integrate gender as a central category. After a brief outline of Bourdieu's reasoning in Masculine Domination and of the controversy surrounding this essay, I discuss the concept of habitus, which forms the theoretical core of Masculine Domination, in the broader context of Bourdieu's work. Habitus is an analytical tool that overcomes the discipline's theoretical barriers to the integration of the category of gender on a central point: the concept of the social agent. I will demonstrate this by opposing the concept of habitus to the construct of the social role that, up to this day, is most influential in shaping the sociological understanding of the social agent.

Key Words: gender • habitus • masculine domination • social role • sociological theory • symbolic violence

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, No. 6, 119-134 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406069778
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