The sexed and gendered body as a social institution: a critical reconstruction of two social constructionist models: Bourdieu's theory of habitus and the performative theory of social institutions

Abstract

By highlighting the embodied forms of social life, contemporary debates in Social Sciences have created new necessity to explore two major binary oppositions, that of nature and society and structure and individual. The definition of these core notions from different sociological perspectives is currently engendering tensions which indicate a need to advance a more detailed analysis. The aim of this thesis is to explore new understandings of social constructionist accounts of the body by focusing on sex/gender identity and by critically comparing two constructionist views: Bourdieu's Theory of Practice and its core notion of habitus, and The Performative Theory of Social Institutions, the social theory of The Strong Programme (a brand of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge developed by Barnes and Bloor).I argue that whereas Bourdieu's novelty is that he locates social effects at the level of the body, his theory, by envisaging this socialization as a Parsonian model of early internalization resulting in permanent fixidity, suffers from an over-deterministic bias. On the other hand The Performative Theory of Social Institutions' basic tenet that social life is the self-referential (performative) achievement of the interactive activity of a collective of heterogeneous but mutually susceptible individuals stands in stark contrast with Bourdieu's notion of the stability of the habitus as the individual internalization of preexisting macro-structures.The Performative Theory, although not specifically concerned with the body, provides an analytical framework that challenges Bourdieu's materialistic account which tacitly reifies the social as a external 'objective' entity. 1 present Butler's performative theory of sex and gender identity to further reveal the analytical implications of Bourdieu's model of habitus as an 'externalist' structuralist model and its application to a sex/gender habitus as exposing an unacknowledged biological essentialist bias. By introducing Kusch's notion of artificial kinds, closely connected with the main tenets of the performative theory of social institutions, I develop a definition of an embodied habitus as a 'social institution', that is, as the result of the constitutive power of the performative practices of individuals. With the introduction of the work of Kusch and Scheff I also identify the constitutive role of social sanctioning in protecting meaning stability. With this I reconstruct two core themes of Bourdieu's structuralist model: that of the stability of doxic formations as the result of individuals' interactive activity (thus advancing a new understanding of the dualism between macro- and micro-phenomena) and the social genesis of the physicality of the human body (revealing new paths to explore for the nature/culture debate). The sexed body is thus the result of individuals' performative activity (verbal or otherwise), which constitutes the materiality of the body and our conceptions of it according to collective beliefs about the category of' sex'.The political scope of this discussion is highlighted by comparing Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power with the Foucauldian notion of 'productive power', reconstructed by Kusch as an internal-essential relationship. This reconstruction advances new understandings of the constructionist claim that 'power constitutes subjects'. This is a framework which better accounts for radical constructivist claims, like that of Butler, that the (sexed) body is a discursive construction, and enables the further questioning of Bourdieu's 'externalist' structuralist commitment. In comparison, I present the performative theorists as an 'internalist' structuralist model which presents a more accomplished understanding of the constitution of social life.With the critical comparison between Bourdieu's sociological model and that of The Performative Theory of Social Institutions, this thesis exposes two radically distinct sociological models which I claim represent a profound rift current within sociological enquiry. Comparing the 'materialist' sociological account of Bourdieu's model with that of the 'idealist' position of the performative theorists (and Butler, Foucault and Kusch) allows me to draw on two different definitions of 'objective' macro structure, one derived from an 'externalist' metaphysical understanding of macro-phenomena and another which contends that macro-phenomena are 'internal' and exist in and through social activity. This critical comparison also allows me to introduce new understandings of the process of sex and gender acquisition, to shed light on the analytical problems inherent in the sex/gender distinction, and thus to contribute to the feminist debate on antiessentialism and the epistemological and political value of the sex/gender distinction.