Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, which is ‘violence that is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’...provides an explanation of how social inequalities can continue largely unabated. Within this perspective, individual subjects are subjected to various forms of violence, such as being treated unfairly or denied resources, or are limited in their social mobility and aspirations, but they do not tend to see it that way; rather it is misrecognised by individual subjects as the natural order of things. Gender domination in the patriarchal family is an example of symbolic violence in operation. Through habitus formation in this context, women were often confined emotionally, socially, economically and physically and the perception that women were inferior to men in the home and more generally in society was perpetuated. Women’s misrecognition of this violence as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ gendered relations in the world led to their being complicit in reinscribing through their daily practices, their own domination.
kerry H Robinson
critical, feminist, gender-order, habitus, women