Bourdieu - Social Practice Theory

The main question of the current study is to investigate how transgender identities are produced through social practices, and a subsidiary question is - to what extent do transgender practices subvert or sustain the normative gender order? Social practices refer to everyday human activities, habitually performed, recurring interactive actions, that provide meaning and structure to individual and social groups, and are produced by and productive of the broader social structure. Social practices contribute to the construction of personal and social identities, and the perception of histories and the memories of social groups.

The social order is a system of linked social structures, institutions, relations, values, and practices; determined by and determining of the actions of individuals, and, as discussed in previous section, the gender order is produced and maintained by everyday gendered social practices - by individuals acting like women and men, by

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

64 doing gender. By taking social practices as the basis for a sociological understanding of social systems, practice theory explains the dialectic between social structure and human agency working reflexively on each other, constructing and being constructed.

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977) reconciles a subjectivist emphasis on individual agency with objectivist structural determinism, by formulating the theoretical concepts of the subjective habitus and the objective field (Wacquant, 1989).

The theory of the habitus describes the internalization of the social order in the human body, to form ‘permanent dispositions’ - an individual’s cognitive, emotional, and embodied demeanour - ‘which organises practices and the perception of practices’

(Bourdieu, 1984: 170). The locus classicus for Bourdieu’s definition of habitus is from the Logic of Practice:

The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices (Bourdieu, 1990:66-67).

Habitus is the set of dispositions that arise from primary socialisation and social class position. These are conditions of existence, ways of being, thinking, feeling, instilled by the family from an early age and socially reinforced through education and culture.

During the primary socialization processes, the habitus becomes deeply embedded in the individual subject through lived practice rather than conscious learning, producing ways of doing things that enable effective functioning within a given field. The dispositions produced by the habitus are passed down over generations, the product of an individual’s family, class position, socio-economic status, education. It is

‘embodied history, internalized as second nature … the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 56). Thus habitus is the major link between individual embodiment and social structures, it is: ‘society written into the body’ (Bourdieu, 1990b:63).

Hexis is Bourdieu’s term for the manner in which the habitus is internalized and manifested through body demeanor, language, gesture: ‘The body is in the social world but the social world is also in the body’ (Bourdieu, 1990:190). The embodied habitus is expressed across a range of practices. The body becomes a memory and acts as a

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

65 repository for the values of the dominant culture ‘beyond the grasp of consciousness’

(Bourdieu, 1977: 93). The habitus thus confers objective social significance on subjective bodily actions, which are internalized to become dispositions, which lead to practices, which in turn can either reproduce or transform social structures.

The possible permanent embedded nature of habitus and hexis was an area of concern for MtF transwomen in the current study, most of whom had transitioned later in life.

When transwomen construct themselves through embodied practices to inhabit the category of femininity, it is a sign under which they long to belong, but do not have the requisite habitus or hexis, neither the life experience nor embodied dispositions.

Because socialisation processes are based on gendered differences, male and female learn different ways of being and behaving from infancy, gender constructions that are difficult to undo. For example women in certain western cultures learn a greater expression of facial mobility denoting emotional responses, which transwomen participants in the current study said they find difficult to emulate, having been socialised into a masculine hexis with an emphasis on the concealment of emotion. Not having the embodied dispositions of individuals primarily socialised into a particular gender, this can never be an unthinking practice for transwomen who have to reflexively relearn the feel for the gender game through conscious, reiterated performance. This is generally easier for FtM to do so, as shown by the evidence of cases throughout history where women have passed as men (Cowell, 1954; Wheelright, 1989; Feinberg, 1997). However for MtF an entrenched masculine disposition is not easy to transform, and male hexis seems to be more difficult to disguise than female, mainly due to the irreversible and undisguisable embodied transformations wrought by testosterone after male puberty affecting height, voice etc. Thus new bodily mannerisms or hexis require conscious cultivation as transwomen author their own experiences of femininity at the level of localised practice. Although some transwomen would argue that this is not a learning of a new identity, but rather the emergence of an earlier authentic feminine self that had been overlaid by years of acquiring masculinity.

If habitus is presented as almost permanent sediments of embodied culture in Bourdieu’s theory, Terry Lovell questions its capacity to account for when individuals do learn to perform convincingly as a different gender (generally easier for FtMs).

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

66 Lovell asks how it is that some women have managed to acquire the necessary ‘feel for the game’ and practical sense of masculine habitus, to enable them to successfully pass as cross-gender for example in military settings (Lovell, 2000:29). Conversely for Lovell, poststructuralist gender theories such as those of Butler, fail ‘to take account of the embeddedness of structures in things’ (Lovell, 2000:26) thus placing:

the very concept of passing in question, for all identity can come to be seen as a species of passing if it is no more than its own wilful performance in the right circumstance with the right co-actors, and therefore with no ground for appeal to

‘real’ identities which the performances may conceal (Lovell, 2000:30).

For Lovell, neither the inflexible nature of Bourdieu’s habitus, nor the over flexibility of Butler’s deconstructionism alone can account for cross gender passing. Given their shared theoretical focus on the body, Lovell proposes a constructive engagement between Bourdieu’s account of the social construction of the human subject through practice, with Butler’s account of subjectivity as performance (Lovell, 2000:27).

However an emphasis on performativity may not be compatible with a strong idea of habitus even when Bourdieu’s mitigating concept of reflexivity is taken into consideration.

Different degrees of emphasis are placed by practice theorists on the extent to which everyday practices are determined by social structures, and the possibilities for these practices to challenge the prevailing social order. For Bourdieu it is practice that allows an individual the ability to resist structural determination through ‘his or her capacity for invention and improvisation’ (Bourdieu 1990:13). What could be labelled as a voluntarist secondary socialisation is observable in the context of MtF transgender support groups where individuals school each other in feminine dispositions constructing their identities intersubjectively. The results are to mixed effect, particularly when transwomen adopt practices of stereotypical feminine presentation.

The dispositions that some transwomen associate with performing femininity can exaggerate extreme aspects, for example a glamorous physical presentation along with deeper aspects of female gendering such as passivity, fragility, and a desire for social approval.

The theory of habitus clivé or cleft habitus (Bourdieu, 1999) is of interest to an analysis of transgender identities. In Bourdieu’s framework, dispositions arising from the

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

67 habitus are regarded as durable and usually unchanging, but can lose coherence if the sense of self becomes dislocated. When the forces acting upon a subject change due to a dramatic alteration in the conditions of an individual’s existence, or a traumatic experience occurs, a mismatch can ensue between field and habitus causing fragmentation in the self. This reaction towards a ‘contradictory injunction’, Bourdieu terms ‘hysteresis’, an ambivalence of the self, which can result in a cleft habitus: ‘to produce a habitus divided against itself …. a kind of double perception of self, to successive allegiances and multiple identities’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 511). This is applicable to the transition experience where it can be difficult to maintain an ontological coherence of self in the struggle to retain connections to previous social and intimate relationships while developing a new identity and gaining acceptance in new social groupings.

Also valuable for the analysis of transgender practices is Bourdieu’s (1984, 1986) extension of Marx’s concept of capital into economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital. Habitus is the physical embodiment of capital, which provides a conceptual tool for the material analysis of everyday practices, and how individuals use these to gain access to power in a given field. Economic capital is material wealth comprising very high salaries, surplus value profits from landed or industrial capital. Cultural capital is acquired through education and serves to legitimate ruling class values, comprising: embodied capital in the form of durable dispositions of accent, posture, mannerisms; objectified capital in the form of cultural goods and material possessions;

institutionalised capital in the form of knowledge and education that determines tastes and skills, academic credentials and titles that symbolise cultural competence and authority. Social capital includes resources derived from group membership, institutionalised social networks of influence, connections, acquaintances, friends, family relationships. Bourdieu was particularly interested in the role of capital in the reproduction of inequalities, and restricts his concept of social capital to explain how jobs, resources, and position remain within a closed circuit network of those who went to the right schools and have the right family connections; an exclusionary device precluding possibilities of social mobility. The current study broadens this concept to include the sense of mutually beneficial social networks, and the possibility of accrual of social capital through participation in transgender support groups and online

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68 communities. Bourdieu’s later addition of the fourth symbolic capital signifies honour, prestige, and social recognition.

The value of different forms of capital is tied to the context in which they are located and the corresponding power and privilege to which they give access. All forms of capital are determined by social environment and access to resources, and each in turn determines class and status in a society. For example the cultural capital gained from the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions inherited from family history and life experiences. Habitus is the physical embodiment of different forms of capital, providing a set of skills and dispositions, linked to class position, for the successful navigation of social environments. But trans people can find that the old habitus does not suffice after transition and can actually function to the detriment in their transformed social scenario.

The importance of Bourdieu’s theory of capital to gender analysis is apparent in Masculine Domination where he argues that universally, women’s status is tied to their position as capital bearing objects of exchange, whose value accrues to their primary kinship group, rather than as capital accumulating subjects in their own right (Bourdieu, 2001:97). Some transwomen appear to fit into this framework, constructing themselves as objects of desire and exchange within ritual courtship games, making investments in their sexual bodies as a form of cultural capital, so as to accrue social capital. The goal of these investment strategies is often modelled on a passive, glamorous, airbrushed, media projection of femininity. This is the antithesis of the form of cultural capital struggled for by the feminist movement, and has been a source of their contention with trans women. It is a femininity that is uninhabitable on a long term basis in the real world, and only really sustainable on the basis of large amounts of time and economic capital. Bourdieu’s discussion of different forms of capital suggests a way in which to frame transgender social groupings and relationships.

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