Lisa Adkins

Reflexivity Freedom or Habit of Gender

In this article the increasing significance of Bourdieu’s social theory is mapped in recent sociological accounts of gender in late-modern societies. What is highlighted in particular is the influence of Bourdieu’s social theory, and especially his arguments regarding critical reflexivity and social transformation, on a specific thesis which is common to a number of contemporary feminist accounts of gender transformations in late modernity. Here it is suggested that in late modernity there is a lack of fit between habitus and field in certain public spheres of action via an increasing transposition or movement of the feminine habitus from private to public spheres, which is linked to a heightened critical reflexivity vis-à-vis gender and to detraditionalization. In this article, however, a number of limits regarding this line of argument are highlighted, especially those flowing from the unproblematic coupling of reflexivity with detraditionalization. This exploration in turn leads to a critical discussion of Bourdieu’s ideas regarding social transformation. In particular it is asked why, when thinking about social transformation, does Bourdieu abandon his own principles regarding practice?In this article the increasing significance of Bourdieu’s social theory is mapped in recent sociological accounts of gender in late-modern societies. What is highlighted in particular is the influe...

Reflexivity: Freedom or habit of gender?

The increasing significance of Bourdieu’s social theory in the social sciences and humanities has been noted by a number of writers (Fowler, 1997; Painter, 2000; Shusterman, 1999). In this chapter I am concerned to map this influence in recent accounts of gender in late modern societies. More specifically, I aim to map this influence on a specific thesis which is common (either implicitly or explicitly) to a number of contemporary feminist analyses of gender transformations. This thesis draws on Bourdieu’s arguments about social transformation and especially his arguments regarding the constitution of a critical reflexive stance towards formerly normalized – or at least, taken-for-granted – social conditions. More particularly, this thesis draws on the Bourdieusian argument that such reflexivity is constituted in circumstances where there is lack of ‘fit’ between the habitus (the feel for the game) and field (the game itself), that is, when synchronicity between subjective and objective structures is broken. More particularly still, this thesis involves the argument that in late modernity there is a lack of fit between habitus and field in certain public spheres of action via an increasing transposition or movement of the feminine habitus from private to public spheres. For those deploying this thesis two further stages of argument usually flow from this proposition. The first is that this transposition constitutes a heightened critical awareness vis-à-vis gender and the second is that this transposition is linked to specific forms of gender detraditionalization. In short, this thesis concerns a three-fold argument in regard to gender which links feminization, critical reflexivity and detraditionalization. But while in this chapter I map the characteristics of this thesis, I am also concerned to highlight its limits. In particular, and by drawing on alternative accounts of reflexivity to that of the critical reflexivity found in Bourdieu’s account of social transformation, as well as recent ethnographic studies of the workplace, the easy association made between reflexivity and detraditionalization is questioned. I will argue that reflexivity should not be confused with (or understood to concern) a liberal freedom to question and critically deconstruct the rules and norms which previously governed gender. Indeed rather than

The New Economy, Property and Personhood

This article focuses on the new economy. While a number of recent analyses have considered how new economic arrangements rework a range of material relations, this article suggests that such considerations have tended to stop short of considering how material relations may be reconstituting vis-à-vis the people who are working in the new economy. This is so, it will be argued, because there is a pervasive assumption of what is termed a social contract model of personhood, where people are assumed to own or at least to strive to accumulate skills, capacities and abilities (that is, labour power) as forms of property in the person. However, what this article underscores is that the relations between people and their labour in the new economy are being reworked. In particular, it highlights how qualities previously associated with people are being disentangled and are becoming the object of processes of qualification and re-qualification. However, such qualities do not take the form of property in the person as claims towards the ‘ownership’ of this labour lie in the domain of audience effects - that is, in relations external to the person. This shift, it is argued further, locates labour in the new economy firmly in the domain of the production and circulation of cultural value. Indeed, more broadly this article suggests that the now commonplace idea that economy and culture are de-differentiating involves a previously unrecognized restructuring of the relations between people and property and even the end of the modern notion of personhood.

Social Capital: The Anatomy of a Troubled Concept

Within the social sciences the widespread impact of the social capital concept has prompted strong critique on the part of feminists, for it is a concept which appears to reinstate a version of social worlds which for the past thirty years or more feminist social scientists have sought to problematize and move beyond. Yet do these critiques go beyond the social capital paradigm? It is the contention of this article that they do not and in particular that such critiques fail to problematize the association of women with collective social goods found in the social capital literature. It will be suggested further that this association relates to the use of a dualism of instrumentality versus freedom, whereby women are overwhelmingly associated with the latter. This article therefore delineates a gendered subtext operative within the social capital debates. Recognition of this subtext should lead feminists to disengage with the social capital concept, for this is a concept whose use will always trap women in the social-historical time of industrial society.

From Retroactivation to Futurity: The End of the Sexual Contract?

This article investigates the changing relations between gender and labour in contemporary capitalism. It challenges what has become a default although mostly implicit position for understanding this relationship, namely what I shall term, following the work of Carole Pateman (1988), a sexual contract position. This position will be shown to cast labour with a particular temporal structure, namely as a package of capacities and abilities which are developed, accumulated, and stored up over time and become, as Pierre Bourdieu might have it, part of the habitus of the worker. But the relevance of this model is questioned in a context where labour appears not to be organized with reference to embodied accumulation but with reference to an open and vital future. And if labour now concerns such futurity, this article asks, does this imply that the sexual contract has passed away? Certainly the latter is implied in the view that we are witnessing a break with a previous synchronicity between work and life and in the idea that (particularly young) women are now hyper‐charged with economic capacity. But do these ideas and interventions fully grasp the passing of the sexual contract? This article suggests that they do not. To do so requires a direct confrontation with changing arrangements of labour.

Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor after the Financial Crisis

The recent global financial crisis and subsequent recession sparked, among other things, a call for all manner of returns to previous states of existence, both real and imagined. It also sparked fears that this set of events is returning us to certain undesired states. This included the claim that the crisis and ensuing recession, especially increasing rates of job loss for women, threaten the return of the exclusionary sexual contract characteristic of Fordism. In the words of one commentator, the recession threatens to “send women back to the kitchen.” As such, the ongoing recession has been positioned as disassembling the radical transformations in women’s labor encountered in post-Fordism, especially the positioning of that labor as a site of potential and promise. In this essay I suggest, however, that imagining the recession as returning us to an exclusionary sexual contract thoroughly misunderstands the processes of the production of value in post-Fordism. In particular it brackets the process of the folding of the economy into society, a process concerning the movement of productive and value-creating activities away from the formal

Feminism after measure

This article engages the crisis of measure currently being articulated within social and cultural theory and the associated claim that this crisis should compel an embrace of methods which seek to know the heterogeneous, the multiple, the complex and the vague. Taking the rise of immaterial forms of labour and value as paradigmatic of the crisis of measure, it questions the use of the figure of a domestically labouring woman who lacks ownership of her labour to illuminate this crisis, as well as the structural equivalence currently being forced between ‘women’s work’ (especially the work of social reproduction) and productive activities. It does so with reference to the changing relationship between women and social reproduction, a changing relationship which suggests that at the heart of the crisis of measure is a restructuring of time. This article therefore adds fuel to the view that the relations of temporality are now a key ground for feminist theory.

Introduction: Gender, Living and Labour in the Fourth Shift

Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to the arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. [... F]actory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale and [...] the places of women are crucial—and need to be analysed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in various situations. (Haraway 1991: 166)

Sexual work and the employment of women in the service industries

This chapter will consider factors which structure sexual relations between men and women in the labour market. It will show that gendered employment relations contribute to the production of compulsory heterosexuality for women because, in order to have access to employment (to be employees), women must participate in male-initiated and male-dominated heterosexual interactions. They must provide various kinds of sexual servicing l for men, both as customers and as co-workers. This will be shown using material drawn from a study of two British tourist operations, which included detailed and in-depth exploration and observation of work relations between men and women in various employment situations . When this research was begun in 1987, the question of the importance of sexual relations for the gender dynamics of employment had received scant attention. Most if not all labour market theory, including that produced by feminists, had either completely ignored sexuality or considered it thoroughly unimportant for the gendered operations of the labour market and indeed for the construction of gender per se (see for example Hartmann, 1979; Walby, 1986). Some of this theory seemed in fact to deny that sexual relations actually operated in the labour market despite work by radical feminists on the sexual harassment of women in employment which clearly questioned this assumption (see for example MacKinnon, 1976; Stanko, 1985, 1988); and despite a great deal of feminist research which showed just how important sexual relations are for controlling and shaping all aspects of social reality for women for creating gender inequalities generally. In all such radical feminist research, the extent to which sexuality is male controlled and defined was made clear (see eg Russell, 1984; Hanmer and Maynard, 1987; Kelly, 1987).

Sociological Futures: From Clock Time to Event Time

This article articulates a shift from clock time to event time, a shift which raises particular challenges to dominant sociological strategies in regard to temporality, especially in regard to the future. In particular it raises challenges to the idea that alternative futures may be found by stretching time to the time disenfranchised or by seeking out and uncovering counter hegemonic forms of time. Taking feminist sociological approaches to time as a case in point, this article shows that while such strategies were relevant when time operated externally to events; they have little traction when time unfolds with events. For Sociologists to continue in their promise of working to secure alternative futures, their analyses must therefore become entangled in event time.