Social Inequality and the Hermeneutics of the Body: A Socio-Psychological and Cultural Comparison between Germany and Brasil

The aim of this doctoral thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of how social inequality emerges and persists and of how social change might be initiated. The thesis is composed of a theoretical reflection and an empirical analysis focusing on the interplay of objective social conditions and bodily-psychical patterns in order to explain the evolution of social order. In the theoretical part of the thesis, a psychoanalytic-semiotic concept of habitus, linking different theoretical approaches, i.e. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the socialisation theory of Alfred Lorenzer and Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs, is developed. The unconscious, understood as social phenomenon, plays a central role within the established concept. The empirical study undertaken within the framework of this thesis, which is based on interviews and group discussions conducted with female university professors and cleaning personnel in Germany and Brasil, reveals the unconscious, preconscious and conscious dimensions of the women's habitus providing for the maintenance of social inequality as well as for the promotion of social change