Customer Reviews

Masculine Domination

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

A local fraternal organization was presenting Anthony Bourdain in person speaking about his career and showing clips of his shows, to benefit charity. I got a premium ticket, being such a fan of Bourdain and the original TV series of Kitchen Confidential. After the presentation he was to do a signing, so I thought I'd surprise my partner with a signed copy of Bourdain's latest book, which I ordered ahead of time (from Amazon of course). It sounded like vintage Bourdain, Masculine Domination. Some of the funniest moments in KC the series was when Bradley Cooper wouldn't let any female chefs on the "line" as they call it, whereas even the worst male chef he'd give the nod to. This drove the restaurant manager (female) crazy and eventually Bradley Cooper gave in a little, rolling his eyes and heaving great sighs.

The lecture and clips were first rate, but I made a fool of myself when, after waiting on line a good 15 minutes, I asked the famous TV chef to autograph Masculine Domination! He looked at it in disgust, curling his lip and letting loose with some salty language, and his handlers whispered, this is not by Bourdain, it is by Pierre Bourdieu. Were there two of them? I asked, but then they escorted me back to my table where I and some of the other attendees discussed the situation. Was my face red! He wouldn't stop grimacing at me, even in the midst of chatting up the remaining people standing on line with their proper books. The man has written more than his share of books, but it appears that this is not among them.

That said, even though Masculine Domination fails the grade as a Bourdain book about bad kitchens, it's not a bad read. Bourdieu has this concept of "symbolic violence," basically saying that the forces of power no longer need to exert actual violence on the little people to keep the status quo of capitalism going; things have reaches a perfect melting point of image and reality, so that now mere "symbolic violence" is frightening enough. In particular, women, who are "subjected to a labour of socialization which tends to diminish and deny them," so that they reach instinctively for the positions men want them to take, namely, "self-denial, resignation and silence." Bourdieu sees this syndrome as a total one, in operation everywhere around the world, in all nations, rich and poor. Historically speaking, masculine domination has been but one way, argues Bourdieu, to propagate what he refers to as "the masculine vision," and the chief agents have been the family (far and away the leader in ideology), the church, and the educational system. Paradoxically as bourgeois women leave the workforce, they become mainstays of the church, so that from Victorian times onward, to all practical purposes, men have ceded membership in the church to the women otherwise disenfranchised from agency. But men "continue to dominate" both the public sphere and the field of power (particularly "economic power, over production." You can see how reading Bourdieu and Bourdain is but either side of the same coin, and how the hyperselection of women occurs even in the kitchens of the chic-est restaurants in New York, Paris and London, and the bistros surrounding them like barnacles at the bottom of a submarine. So, I was wrong, but I was right at the same time.

bourdieu applies his theoretical toolkit to one more field, and, as the hateful reactions of other reviewers testify, it hurts. this is indeed not talk radio and you will need to gather some philosophical/sociological resources to follow bourdieu, but it is completely worth it. in a small book, the foundations are laid of a systematic exploration of gender as a locus of symbolic domination.

here is to hoping bourdieu's numerous students will build on these foundations.

Bourdieu's structuralist analyses of gender in Kabyle culture and personal reflections on gender in the modern Western world are consistently cogent, thoughtful, and well-presented. A number of other reviewers have called this book "unreadable." It is certainly full of Bourdieu's characteristic jargon, but I would like to note that this jargon is systematically developed throughout all of Bourdieu's work; learning to read it is not unlike learning a language. I therefore would not recommend this text to someone unfamiliar with Bourdieu. First read Distinction, his foundational work on cultural capital, and perhaps Wacquant's introduction to Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology. Take some time. Define and redefine his terminology for yourself. This book, along with his others, will become more readable and, of course, more rewarding.

Despite the interesting nature of the book, much of the power of the book is lost in translation. English is not French and the sexism blatantly apparent in French is nuetered by the nature of English. Even so, considering a book unreadable is more a critique of the reader than the book even if the reader states their true opinion of the book. That's pretty obvious isn't it? One fun thing with this book is the frequency PB's comments are a reflection on the language he is using and since the English has different characteristics than the French the points miss their mark. But this brings up the question, has feminism been more successful in English speaking countries precisely because English uses neuter for most nouns? If PB is right about French, then what does that say about English? German? Spanish? Reading this book makes more sense when you are familiar with the French or can at least realize in French the self-referential nature of many of the points make sense while simply being baffling in English.

I was pleased with the price and condition of the item. I read it for a class for school. It was difficult to understand until the professor discussed it with the class. Really good and valuable book for anyone to read.

This short and nearly unreadable book mostly repeats what Collège de France sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proclaimed about symbolic violence and habituated dispositions to comply with power from 20 to 30 years ago. It mixes structuralist analyses of the lifeways of the Kabyle (an Algerian Bedouin group) and some very unsystematic gleanings from more recent French and American research on gender.

Bourdieu claims that it is vital to investigate _historical_ mechanisms for the dehistoricization/eternalization of dichotomous structuring by sex, but he totally avoids any systematic historical analysis and does not have any historical data. He also does not even consider the possibility that some division by sex might be natural (biologically based) rather than "naturalized" (arbitrary arrangements misrecognized as being from nature).

In addition to recycling structuralist analysis of Kabyle honor (vs. shame) and repeating oracular dicta about misrecognition, symbolic violence, etc., Bourdieu attached an appendix about gay/lesbian movements. It is obvious that he knows very little about the movements, the research literature on them, or about lesbian or gay couples.
I am tempted to deliver the famed verdict that what is new in this book is not sound and what is sound is not new. Although I think that Bourdieu repeats rather than develops what he wrote about domination during the 1970s, his focus (in theory, if not often in practice) on embodied, reproduction of domination remains important -- and undeveloped herein.

Bourdieu presents a wonderful analysis of the way our culture is currently shaped in terms of gender roles. He also presents a few ideas on how we can work to change the society we live in, and who has the most ability to do this. Despite what the other reviews say, the language is a little weighty, but understandable. Overall a great read.

Someone needs to point out that the emperor has no clothes: Regardless of how respected Bourdieu might be in academic circles, this book is an utterly unreadable waste of trees. I don't know whether to blame the translator or the author, but I suspect the blame rests with the latter. Are words such as doxic, sociodicy, habitus, maleficence, somatized, opacity, and qabel in your vocabulary?

Here's a sample sentence: 'But this anamnesis does not apply only to eidetic content, as it does for Plato; nor only, as it does for Freud, to an individual process of constitution of the unconscious, the social aspect of which, without really being excluded, is reduced to a generic and universal family structure, the embodied imprint of a collective history, which is never socially characterized' (p. 55)

I'll save you the agony of plowing through 100+ pages of this: Everything in life reflects man's dominance over women. We see this in the way male genitalia protrude from the body, symbolizing power, and in fact we see male dominance in every aspect of life.

These are thoughts that have been expressed more clearly elsewhere. Bourdieu uses an Algerian tribal group - hardly a hotbed of gender equality - as his book's theme, which does rather stack the deck in favor of making his argument.

This book is one big regurgitation of tired feminist anti-man dogma from an author who apparently has not the first clue about his subject. I'm sure it will be well received by pseudo intellectual feminists wanting affirmation of their own misandrist prejudice, but anyone else would be wasting their time. In a footnote to the prelude the author thanks "especially women" for providing him with information about dominant men. He extensively cites folk customs of a particular subdivision of Algerian people and extrapolates that into a general condemnation of men and western society in general. On every page are unsupported misandrist assertions and prejudicial rhetoric. It reads like a poorly written parody of a KKK lecture on relations between blacks and whites, except its about men and women, and he's serious. The author beats around the bushes filling the book with page after page of common feminist hate propaganda, and then finally gets around to his real message in the Appendix, which is about "the gay and lesbian movement." Not that he hasn't used a lot previous references to gay sexual domination though, it's in every chapter. Apparently a gay author, he finally reveals why he has no experience or understanding of normal relationships between men and women, and why he's willing to publish anti-male dogma that promotes disharmony between women and men. If it belongs on a bookshelf so does the testimony of the Aryan Nations, the KKK and the National Socialist party. Misandrist feminists will all like the book and vote "not helpful" to this review.