Domination and Disobedience or, Are There Any “Good Husbands”? – Bourdieu, Foucault and Feminisms

Feminist readings of Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality, Discipline and Punish) and Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste; Masculine Domination) raise the question of the possible combination of different discourses (philosophy, sociology, politics, ideology and activism) when dealing with the category of “sexuality” and “gender”. It seems as if one were considered not having said enough, and the other having said too much. Criticism is embodied by those two very different figures of disobedience in a way to encourage the creation of new schemes of politicisation, new forms of culture, discourse and language indifferent to gender (Foucault). Bourdieu’s intentions are more pragmatic, his ethos much less aesthetic than Foucault’s. Foucault’s antiquity is Bourdieu’s Kabylia, the sign of the socialisation of the biological and the biologisation of the social. If Foucault’s analysis ruptures, limits and changes, Bourdieu’s analyses the stereotypes and the self-explanatory. Two “bad husbands” (Fraser) and bad “gurus” show that thinking about activism outside the framework of personal convictions and daily politics is very difficult, if not impossible. When confronted with feminisms, both of them underline the problem of thinking about a plural phenomenon that is both critical theory and political practice. Foucault once said that he always wrote only fiction. Literature may well be one way to outgrow these divisions, as the only potentially all-conquering language; not as its own mystification, nor as the pathos of a possible future, but as a fiction which disables the classification of doubles: fiction and non-fiction, truth and history, narrative and storytelling