Social Movement Studies, 2013 Vol. 12, No. 4, 397–413, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2013.823345
Symbolic Violence and Collective Identity: Pierre Bourdieu and the Ethics of Resistance CHRIS SAMUEL
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Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
ABSTRACT Social movement researchers have only recently begun to make use of the rich explanatory leverage offered by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. The normative implications of his framework remain almost entirely undeveloped. This paper seeks to redress these shortcomings by applying central concepts from Bourdieu’s work—symbolic violence and his realist philosophy of science—to social movement analysis. Using North American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer collective identities to illustrate this application, the paper advocates shifting analysis of collective identities from models based on negotiation to one based on domination and advocates treatment of social movement organizations as sites of justice amenable to normative evaluation and critique. KEY WORDS : Bourdieu, collective identity, LGBT, queer, symbolic violence, social movements, domination
. . . symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it. (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 164) Despite their considerable explanatory power and conceptual nuance, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological insights have received relatively little attention within social movement studies (Crossley, 2002, p. 15; Swartz, 2006). My interest in this paper is to contribute to efforts to make use of Bourdieu’s approach within the study of contentious politics, but with a focus on normative issues within processes of collective identity formation. More specifically, I use tensions within lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender and queer (LGBT/Q) communities over movement goals and self-understandings to advocate for a Bourdieu inspired account of social movement organizations as a potentially important site of justice. The central tension I am interested in here is the division that is often drawn between ‘lesbian and gay’ politics on the one hand and ‘queer’ politics on the other. This division is, in fact, a crude shorthand for a number of tensions within LGBT/Q communities such as those between liberationist and assimilationist perspectives on movement goals and Correspondence Address: Chris Samuel, Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Mackintosh-Corry Hall, 99 University Ave, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada. Email:
[email protected] q 2013 Taylor & Francis
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strategies, and between activists interested in formal legal equality and those more concerned to resist normalizing social pressure (Shepard, 2001; Warner, 1993; Weeks, 2008). The major queer philosophical and political objections to mainstream gay and lesbian politics can generally be characterized as critiques of a constellation of related processes decried as assimilationist or normalizing. Critiques based on queer ethics seek to revalue queer cultural forms, sexual practices, modes of intimacy and approaches to family and community-building while pointing to the origins of queer social practices in resistance to oppression, discrimination, violence and, in short, homophobia and sex negativity. This queer ethical impulse is typically articulated along a philosophical trajectory traceable through major thinkers such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Wendy Brown and Michael Warner back to Michel Foucault. The central claim of this paper is that appropriating several of Bourdieu’s central thinking tools (Brubaker, 2005, p. 26) and applying them to an analysis of collective identities provides grounds for normative evaluation of movement organizations. The argument is aligned with the tradition of critical theory in which empirical description is wed to normative evaluation (Young, 1990, p. 5). Although empirical application and development of conceptual resources is an essential task for social movement research, this paper contributes to critical theory by developing the tools available to it for normative evaluation. Specifically, I show that collective identity is a site of justice—an object to which principles of justice might be applied—and that social movements’ scope of justice is both internal and external to the movement itself. That is, collective identity processes generate justice claims on movement opponents but also arise from dominated actors within social movements on dominant movement participants (for a good description of this distinction see Abizadeh, 2007, p. 323). My specific interest in this context is the overarching goals toward which LGBT/Q politics are oriented. Mary Bernstein argues that researchers need to be sensitive to different kinds of outcomes (political and policy, mobilization, and cultural) and the fact that activists’ understanding of political, mobilization and cultural goals as well as the feasibility of achieving them under contextspecific circumstances explains a significant portion of why some goals are prioritized and how priorities shift over time (Bernstein, 2003, p. 359). Because collective identity entails articulating an account of suffering to goals for remedying that suffering, applying principles of justice to collective identity will allow observers to evaluate movement outcomes not just in terms of whether goals were successfully achieved but whether injustices in the production of collective identities translate into normative problems of movement goals themselves. In the case of LGBT/Q movements, the policy, mobilization and cultural outcomes Bernstein identifies are products of struggles to orient collective identity toward formal equality at the expense of opposition to normalization. While I focus on LGBT/Q politics specifically, the centrality of collective identity to diverse movements suggests a broad applicability of this approach. Fundamentally, my argument recommends a conception of collective identity grounded in Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power, in which dominated actors preconsciously adopt the point of view of dominant actors even when this point of view is contrary to their interests. In this paper, I describe and integrate three analytic moments. First, I introduce Bourdieu’s related concepts of habitus, capital and symbolic power. Next, I describe Bourdieu’s ‘realist’ understanding of how science can advance toward truth and how social actors can advance toward ‘the universal’. I then suggest an understanding of
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collective identity as a potentially homologous—that is, structurally similar—process of ethical advances with the potential to move toward or away from the universal. My central argument is that conceptually connecting Bourdieu’s understanding of symbolic power and scientific realism to processes of collective identity formation will allow us to normatively assess the history, current state and future prospects of queer mobilization as well as progressive political contention generally. My argument goes beyond Bourdieu in two ways. First, Bourdieu did not undertake a rigorous analysis of collective identity, although he did provide an account of the dynamics between symbolic power and group formation (Bourdieu, 1991, Part Three). Therefore, analytically integrating the notion of symbolic power with the concept of collective identity is already an attempt to put his framework to use in a novel register. Even more, this paper argues that processes of collective identity formation are potential sites of procedural justice and are therefore amenable to normative evaluation. While Bourdieu was a deeply committed political activist and sought to use his own considerable symbolic capital in support of progressive political projects, he dismissed explicit normative theorizing as merely ‘metaphysical’ (Carles, 2001). Nonetheless, analyzing how power operates within collective identities cannot help but produce normative implications. These implications are worth making explicit, and therefore intentional, aspects of ongoing struggles over collective identity. Habitus, Symbolic Power and Symbolic Violence Although Bourdieu situated his work within a theoretical space dominated by the structuralism of Le´vi-Strauss and Sartre’s existentialism (Bourdieu, 1990), his intellectual project owes a considerable debt to classical social theorists particularly in terms of his synthesis of Marx, Durkheim and Weber in particular (Brubaker, 2005, p. 30). Further, his work depended on a critical engagement with phenomenology and phenomenologically based sociology (Crossley, 2001), which Bourdieu claimed relied on a conception of the ‘natural attitude’ that failed to properly historicize what is ‘taken for granted’ or obvious in everyday encounters between agents. Thus, while Berger and Luckmann argue that intersubjective interaction produces a reliable, shared or common sense from ‘the normal, self-evident routines of everyday life’ (1967, p. 23), Bourdieu insists on both the imposed nature of this common sense (i.e., its origins relations of power) and the lack of commonality that derives from the differential social backgrounds from which agents encounter one another (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 44, 1995, p. 57).1 Bourdieu sought to overcome these shortcomings through his central ‘thinking tools’. Of particular relevance for this discussion are habitus, symbolic power and symbolic violence. The habitus is a deeply embodied set of dispositions that, when confronted with objective conditions in the form of social spaces and the physical world, allow an agent to generate practices geared toward maintaining or improving their position in those spaces. Incorporation of the habitus begins in the family through seemingly insignificant and often nonverbal corrections and adjustments to posture, grammar, aesthetic choices, ways of thinking about people, obstacles and opportunities imposed on agents by familial and other authorities. These corrections durably inculcate an orientation toward the world, and transferable ways of interacting with objective, external conditions (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 69, 1991, pp. 50 –51). Adjustment, correction and therefore incorporation of the rules and demands of social and physical spaces continue through the education system and into the world of work and recreation. Because families, schools, workplaces and so on are all
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structured according to their class, ethnic and other social contexts, the trajectory along which an agent moves through those spaces is also marked in terms of the adjustments and corrections that continue to shape that person’s dispositions. Bourdieu was mainly interested in class dynamics, and traced, for example, the relationship between the amount of economic wealth and social prestige agents have and the lifestyle choices they are likely to make in terms of recreation, culture and politics. His empirical work, for example, found that social position was bound ‘by a relation of homology’ to lifestyle choices such as between playing golf and soccer, hiking and fishing, as well as ownership of goods such as second homes or classical art (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 5). The habitus cognitively identifies differences of various kinds: up/down, hot/cold, good/bad, authorized/unauthorized, likely to succeed/likely to fail and so on, and orients action within those differences. None of these differences expresses an intrinsic property of an object, rather the habitus constructs an intrinsic difference between two objects as a relevant difference, as a difference that is important in some way, based on the system of classification the habitus has adopted (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 9). The habitus differentiates among objects, relates them spatially to one another, gives those relations a value-laden, moral character and thereby lends social relevance to fundamentally arbitrary distinctions (Sayer, 2007, pp. 89 –90). Importantly, when the habitus cognitively maps out spatial relations, it does so according to a schema of rules inscribed on it by structured encounters with other habitus. In this way, the habitus cognitively replicates, with varying degrees of success, a field of objects that preexists and structures the habitus itself. The result is a cognitive awareness of social space that is structurally parallel to the objective field in which it is located and laden with a structured emotional response, and endowed therefore with an investment in improving one’s position within that space. Although Bourdieu’s critics have argued that his framework is overly deterministic (Butler, 1999; Jenkins, 1982, p. 272), several important thinkers have sought to rescue Bourdieu from his deterministic and reproductivist tendencies by suggesting that there is greater potential for reflexive consideration of practices than Bourdieu recognized and therefore greater freedom from the apparently determining influences of objective social structures as incorporated into the habitus (Adkins, 2004; Crossley, 2003; McNay, 2004; Skeggs, 2004). Bourdieu articulated his own conception of agency through the formula: [(habitus) (capital)] þ field ¼ practice (1984, p. 101). Here, action is neither fully determined nor reflexive. Agency is reducible neither to the dispositions embodied in the habitus nor to the objective structural conditions—or ‘field’, in Bourdieu’s language—an agent faces, but the highly contingent and dynamic relationship between the two.2 Fields are clusters of practices bound together by relatively autonomous, homologously structured logics. The most significant ones include the economic field, cultural fields and the political field. Social actors always exist in more than one field simultaneously but they bring the same habitus to each field. It follows, therefore, that actors act analogously across contexts. The structurally parallel and porous operation of fields allows us to understand why actors who are dominant in one area—the economy for example—are able to dominate in others, such as the political field (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 77). Bourdieu emphasizes that this porousness is not a mere one-to-one equation, but the result of ‘labours of conversion’ where actions establish, or allow to be established, positions in more than one field, generally with the expectation of improved position in at least one of them (Bourdieu, 2006, p. 113).
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Collective identity constitutes a field in two ways. First, collective identity emerges from the interaction of specific agents including social movement participants and organizations, media, and movement opponents. Second, interactions are unified through competing and even antagonistic efforts to produce representations of the meaning of suffering and mechanisms for redress. Thus, in movement pamphlets and manifestos, rallies, meetings, informal discussions and other diverse contexts, there is inevitably explicit or implicit production and circulation of visions of collective identity. In fact, this production and circulation constitutes the terrain on which debates over formal equality and anti-assimilationist political visions have taken place. Because this circulation takes place in the context of differential distributions of resources, including the cultural skills embodied in the habitus, claims about identity are rarely evaluated and accepted on their own merit, but are instead mediated by the operation of symbolic power. The notion of symbolic power rests on the observation that all the distinctions and rules that comprise social fields are fundamentally arbitrary. Naturally, social fields are not historically arbitrary because they are the products of historical struggles over positions within space and the rules by which positions are taken, but they are morally arbitrary insofar as what counts as good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate in a given field reflects the historical construction of that object or practice in space rather than an inherent attribute of an object or practice. Symbolic power exists whenever the arbitrary nature of a field’s structure and rules is forgotten, misrecognized as natural and therefore preconsciously accepted as the unthought premises of social interaction. In such conditions, the judgments of dominant agents are accepted—often in advance through anticipation—by dominated agents, even when those judgments are contrary to the agents’ interest. Bourdieu emphasizes the bodily nature of this acceptance and indeed its foundation in preconscious embodied dispositions, organized in the habitus. Symbolic power gains its efficacy by triggering the dispositions in the habitus and thereby provoking a response: The practical recognition through which the dominated, often unwittingly, contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting, in advance, the limits imposed on them, often takes the form of bodily emotion (shame, timidity, anxiety, guilt), often associated with the impression of regressing towards archaic relationships, those of childhood and family. (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 169) The visible manifestations of submission to dominant judgments can include blushing, inarticulacy, clumsiness and trembling (p. 169). Submission can also manifest in acceptance of specific and also arbitrary modes of reason, as I argue in the next section. At this point, three concepts related to the symbolic and central to Bourdieu’s work can be defined. Symbolic power is the ability to make use of the rules and distinctions of social space that are to your advantage. So, for example, cisgendered individuals make use of naturalized distinctions about bodies and gender in order to have relatively easy access to identification, medical care and so on.3 Because this ease goes unnoticed, the symbolic power enjoyed here is both an objective benefit and a subjective misrecognition of the fact that it is a benefit. Symbolic power entails naturalizing that benefit and deriving psychic comfort from enjoying a world constructed for the sort of person you are. Symbolic capital is the recognition agents receive when they perform technically correct and contextually appropriate actions in social space. Agents accumulate symbolic capital in the most banal settings—using the proper fork in a fancy restaurant, or
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addressing an employer with ‘appropriate’ deference—but also through technically correct and contextually appropriate use of rhetorical devices and arguments in political debates (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 19). That is, the arbitrary rules and divisions of social space extend to the kinds of arguments that are viable in a given context, who is able to deploy those arguments persuasively and what benefits accrue from making them. Finally, symbolic violence is the experience of feeling out of place, anxious, awkward, shamed, stupid and so on because those who experience symbolic violence are both objectively unable to construct appropriate actions (because the resources necessary to do so are unavailable to them) and subjectively committed to, in the sense of recognizing, the very rules of distinction by which they are excluded and dominated. Symbolic violence consists of both the objective hardship and the subjective experience of self-blame, hesitation, self-censorship and so on. Bourdieu argues that agents are fundamentally oriented toward pursuit of symbolic capital and symbolic power rather than by altruisim, although under certain conditions they may look the same (1990, p. 114; see also Brubaker, 2005, p. 32). This does not imply that movement participants are cynical strategists seeking to outmaneuver those advocating alternative visions of the social world and the chances it offers for movement success. On the contrary, Bourdieu’s approach rejects the idea that most people act from such conscious motivations. While there certainly is room for reflexivity in relation to action, the bulk of what explains practice occurs preconsciously through the habitus’s predisposition to perceive, interpret and engage any field (including movement organizations) according to schemes of classification that legitimate distributions of economic, cultural and above all symbolic resources. Relevant resources include cultural capital manifested through, for example, the ability to communicate articulately (verbally but also through well-designed and professional-appearing literature), comfort dealing with elected officials and even familiarity with how to navigate seemingly neutral organizational practices such as rules of order. Naturally, economic resources are also relevant and include the leisure time to participate in meetings, the ability to fund groups and projects that articulate one’s own vision and so on. An important implication of this is that all agents within a field engaged in a sort of permanent struggle. Therefore, submission to dominant visions is never total but must rather be evaluated in relative terms. That is, submission will depend upon both the amount and composition of the various forms of capital agents that are able to marshal in efforts to impose their vision and the degree to which movement participants, regardless of the amount and quality of their own resources, are disposed to accept the resources of dominant actors and leaders as legitimate and therefore disposed to recognize the vision dominant participants offer based on symbolic dynamics of recognition rather than the merits of the arguments themselves. Indeed, this sort of epistemic violence—the substitution of social authority for rational justification—constitutes the core normative and explanatory problems collective identity processes present. Normative theory has a particular stake in this process as the epistemic violence this substitution may constitute certainly warrants consideration in terms of principles of justice (McConkey, 2004, pp. 198– 199). Analysis of epistemic violence in collective identity formation processes entails rejecting liberal humanism, which equates moral equality to an equal distribution of the skills, dispositions and capacities required to participate effectively in political settings and negotiations. Bourdieu suggests that this conflation is naı¨ve given the real effects of
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living under durable conditions of suffering. In critiquing aesthetic universalism, Bourdieu argues:
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One cannot, in fact, without contradiction, describe (or denounce) the inhuman conditions of existence that are imposed on some, and at the same time credit those who suffer them with the real fulfillment of human potentialities such as the capacity to adopt the gratuitous, disinterested posture that we tacitly inscribe—because it is socially inscribed there—in notions of ‘culture’ or ‘aesthetic’. (1995, p. 75) In this case, what is true of the cultural and aesthetic is true of political practice. The inhuman conditions against which queers struggle are loathsome precisely because they prevent those who suffer and resist those conditions from achieving whatever their full potential might be. To be clear, this is not to suggest that people who are highly excluded, highly marginalized are not capable of political thought and practice, not that they accept dominant visions in their totality and without struggle. It is, however, to say that the durable conditions in which the queerest of queers live and struggle do little to provide the resources necessary to resist symbolic domination and to impose a queer vision of the world on movement organizations and that the conditions of this struggle are weighted against them. Further, the suffering LGBT/Q people experience because of their sexual or gender ‘difference’ is a durable experience of exclusion and can be expected to produce a legitimate orientation toward alleviating that suffering in the most expedient means available . . . even if, to queer and liberationist dismay, the most expedient means is to reduce the appearance of difference rather than difference’s devalued status. In this sense, most LGBT/Q people come to what appear to be negotiations over collective identity with dispositions already disadvantaged by the durable experience of embodying devalued cultural capital and are therefore prone to collusion in existing relations of symbolic power through a difference-reducing orientation. A Bourdieuian analysis of LGBT/Q politics, therefore, would gain explanatory leverage from identifying the operation of symbolic power and symbolic domination within collective identity processes rather than seeing them as the outcome of rational negotiation over desired ends and strategies. Realism, Collective Identity and the Advance of the Universal Bourdieu rejected the notion that the morally arbitrary nature of social spaces condemns them to relativity. In order to escape relativism and advance the universal—which for Bourdieu meant negating the subjective in favor of the transpersonal, the objective, the disinterested—the universal itself must be a prize sought in fields with specific features and populated by appropriately disposed habitus-bearing agents (1995, p. 123). The distinctions through which space is structured and the rules for position-taking within that space are instituted in two places. On the one hand, they are institutionalized in the space itself, the shape of which is the result of historical struggles and position-taking. On the other hand, they are instituted in the habitus of the participants. Indeed, bearing a habitus disposed toward recognizing the rules of a particular social space as well as the stakes involved in that space is a prerequisite for participation in the field. As an agent participates more fully in a field, their habitus undergoes continuous and often unnoticed adjustments to become more compatible with the demands of the field (Bourdieu, 1995, pp. 99 – 100).
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Bourdieu emphasized that having a habitus disposed to participating in a field, which means being disposed to follow the rules and recognize the distinctions of that field, is closely connected with competence. In academia and scholastic settings, disposition and competence appear as practically synonymous, and successful participants in those fields must preconsciously adopt specific orientations and ambitions in order to succeed. Bourdieu characterized scientific fields as similar to others in that participants are mobilized by selfish interests and engage in conflicts over resources, but exceptional in the degree to which the use of reason is instituted in the structures, dispositions, and rules that comprise the field. Specifically, participants in scientific fields mobilize technical competence and scientific knowledge for the sake of accumulating symbolic capital, but the weapons they use in this struggle must be sanctioned principles of proof (i.e., generalizable evidence, rational argumentation, peer review, citation, etc.). In the scientific field, social constraints take the form of logical constraints (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 109). Naturally, these standards and norms are highly contentious and debated, but those debates—struggles really—also recursively rely on reason, logic, evidence and persuasion. Science advances because it has available to it habitus-bearing agents willing to sublimate their drives and interests to the ‘censorship of the scientific field’, namely the rules of methodology, proof and so on (p. 111). Importantly, this means there must be reasonably high entry barriers to participation in the scientific field. Otherwise, the norms of reason and proof by which the field advances could be jeopardized. For Bourdieu (1995), the relationship between well-disposed habitus and struggle over specific (scientific) forms of symbolic capital undertaken in the context of high entry barriers and participation rules that emphasize reason, method and proof rescues truth from the relativism (p. 118). Bourdieu contrasts the dynamics of scientific fields with that of the political field. The political field has low entry barriers—anyone with an opinion can participate at some level—and norms of participation have more to do with advertising, rhetoric, framing strategies and emotional manipulation than rational debate. He argues that: If one wants to go beyond preaching, then it is necessary to implement practically, by using the ordinary means of political action—creation of associations and movements, demonstrations, manifestoes, etc.—the Realpolitik of reason aimed at setting up or reinforcing, within the political field, the mechanisms capable of imposing the sanctions, as far as possible automatic ones, that would tend to discourage deviations from the democratic norm (such as the corruption of elected representatives) and to encourage or impose the appropriate behaviours; aimed also at favouring the setting up of non-distorted social structures of communication between the holders of power and the citizens, in particularly through a constant struggle for the independence of the media. (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 126) This somewhat abstract political vision needs to be specified. In particular, social movement research has reached near consensus that the ‘creation of associations and movements, demonstrations, manifestoes, etc.’ on which Bourdieu’s Realpolitik rests is itself contentious. Further, taking the relationship between entry barriers and competence seriously is an integral part of specifying a Bourdieuian analysis of movement politics. Indeed, democratic commitments to lack of entry barriers in politics function to mask disparities in the competence to participate in political fields. Such commitments conflate
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moral democratic equality with practical equality or equality of competence and therefore legitimize symbolically violent ‘consensuses’ about a movement’s self-understanding and goals. In the next section, I draw together Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power and current conceptions of collective identity in social movement research and provide a rough account of how this analysis can be applied to LGBT/Q movements. This account is meant to be a very brief survey with the primary aim of demonstrating a prima facie case for the presence of symbolic power and domination within collective identity processes. While further empirical and historical work needs to be done to fully understand the mechanisms by which symbolic power has operated in LGBT/Q and other movements, establishing its presence should provide sufficient grounds for the normative and explanatory conclusions I draw out in the subsequent section.
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Symbolic Power, Collective Identity and LGBT/Q Mobilization Alberto Melucci can rightly be credited with bringing a constructivist account of identity to the study of social movement politics. Contrary to rational choice and resource mobilization approaches, Melucci demonstrated that there exists no objective, intrinsic connection between a social identity and a set of social or political interests and introduced the concept of collective identity as an analytic tool for understanding the processes by which these interests are constructed (1996, p. 63). Collective identity is the process by which an ‘action system’ is produced and maintained. This requires the negotiated integration of tensions produced by conflicting definitions of the ends (goals), means (strategies; possibilities and limits) and the field of opportunity (environment) in which action takes place (1995, pp. 44 – 45, 1996, p. 70). Melucci’s original insights have been extensively critiqued and developed within the social movement literature (see, for example, Gamson, 1992, p. 57). Diani and Bison have found that collective identity is analytically useful for how it allows actors to weave ‘different occurrences, private and public, located at different points in time and space, which are relevant to their experience, and that might as well have been conceived of as largely independent from each other under different circumstances’ into a broad narrative capable of mobilizing movement participants (2004, p. 282). Bernstein notes that identity has three analytic levels that are relevant to social movement research: the necessity of a shared collective identity for mobilization, the fact that expressions of that shared identity can be a political strategy aimed at cultural or political goals, and that identity itself can be a goal, for example, in gaining recognition and acceptance for a stigmatized identity or in efforts to deconstruct identity categories (2008, p. 59; on the variability of movement outcomes as they relate to collective identity see also Polletta & Jasper, 2001, pp. 296 – 297). Barr and Drury’s work has also shown that access to a collective activist identity may serve as a resource and strategy for overcoming feelings of disempowerment (which can lead to demobilization) in the wake of failed contentious events by providing both narratives that can frame failures as successes (i.e., a failure to change policy is claimed to be offset by experiences of community, tactical innovations, etc.) and a community to support these narratives. They found, however, that these anti-disempowerment resources are only available to movement participants who already have an ‘activist identity’ (Barr & Drury, 2009, p. 257). A number of authors, accepting the relevance of collective identity as a shared orientation toward goals and strategies, have argued persuasively for the reintroduction of social psychological tools for capturing the processes by which
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collective identities are produced (Barr & Drury, 2009, p. 244; Gamson, 1992, p. 54; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986, p. 464; Stryker, Owens, & White, 2003, p. 2). Such social psychological contributions typically seek to specify mechanisms by which the goal-orienting task of collective identity production described by Melucci is accomplished. Armstrong and Bernstein have articulated what they call a ‘multi-institutional politics’ approach to understanding social movements. Borrowing heavily on the work of Crossley and Bourdieu, the authors advocate an approach that recognizes the decentered, overlapping ways in which power operates within and among disparate institutions. This approach is particularly promising for analysis of collective identity insofar as they argue that ‘investigation of the goals and strategies of movements are opportunities for insight into the nature of domination in contemporary societies’ (Armstrong & Bernstein, 2008, p. 82). Domination based, broadly speaking, on sexual identity is a particular and contingent form of domination produced across numerous sites of power in society. It therefore provides an important opportunity for evaluating how domination is interpreted from within collective identities and how the process of that interpretation reflects dynamics of domination and injustice internal to construction of that interpretation itself. For LGBT/Q communities, the process of collective identity formation involves understanding the differences embodied in queer sexual desires and practices, queer gender identities and queer communities, and constructing an account of the low value those differences are afforded. It then articulates that assessment of difference into an orientation toward specific goals and strategies geared toward redressing the suffering those devalued differences accrue. With few exceptions, most queer critics of lesbian and gay politics argue that mainstream movement goals miss out or actively marginalize alternative political projects, particularly around physical and mental health, communitybuilding, and sex-positivity (M. Warner, 1999, pp. 88 –89; T. Warner, 2002, p. 222). Implicitly, most attribute this distortion to the unequal nature of the negotiations understood to underpin processes of constructing collective identity and interpret these negotiations from within a Foucauldian framework. For example, Michael Warner invokes the Foucauldian notion of ‘counter-public’ to describe the culture surrounding queer cultural practices (1999, p. 178). In his account, these queer counter-publics have been sidelined by the normalizing impulses of mainstream gay organizations, media outlets and opinion leaders (1999, pp. 68, 79). Warner is typical of queer claims that argue, in a Foucauldian vein, that mainstream gay and lesbian politics have been disciplined by discursive norms. Miriam Smith, for example, has powerfully demonstrated how the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada altered the discursive context of LGBT/Q struggles for equality. The new discursive landscape after the Charter’s introduction gave new persuasiveness to equality frames rooted in ‘rights talk’ and helped shift movement goals toward formal legal equality and away from the transformative social and political vision of gay liberation (Smith, 1999, pp. 142, 151). Queer political projects have taken up Foucault’s notion that ‘[where] there is power, there is resistance’ (1978, p. 95), and have been organized around the idea that queerness itself constitutes resistance to processes of normalization but that the power of normalizing discourse has swamped the resistive potential of queerness in favor of, for example, rights discourses. To understand the concrete mechanisms by which this swamping can occur, however, we need to more carefully connect discourse to practice. Bourdieu’s agonistic conception
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of social space as a space of conflict, however, opens analysts to the possibility of collective identity formation as a site of domination rather than deliberation. Bourdieu did not engage collective identity as an analytic tool, choosing instead to understand processes of group formation through delegation of the authority to speak on behalf of a group and submission, on the part of group members, to the spokesperson’s political vision. Naturally, this does not involve a simple relinquishing of authority; delegation is bound up in preexisting struggles and distributions of various forms of capital—particularly cultural capital in the form of the ability to speak well and political capital in the form of being able to produce successful political representations and actions. In this light group formation appears as an act of symbolic power in which those who speak on behalf of a group have disproportionate ability to impose their conception of the group, its environment and its chances on the group itself: What is at stake here is the power of imposing a vision of the social world through principles of di-vision which, when they are imposed on a whole group, establish meaning and a consensus about meaning, and in particular about the identity and unity of the group, which creates the reality of the unity and the identity of the group. (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 221) Like all forms of capital, political capital is highly unevenly distributed. Those who have the least political capital of their own must rely the most on delegated spokespeople to represent them and accumulating political capital is associated with access to material and cultural resources (money, leisure time, cultural capital; Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 172 –174). As a result, movement organizations and even collective identities ought to be conceived as fields of action in which the central stake is that identity’s political vision: its conception of justice and assessment of opportunities. Gross inequalities in political and cultural capital mean that movement participants who are well-positioned outside the collective identity field are better positioned to impose their vision and to have less-advantageously positioned participants recognize that vision as natural and inevitable. Insofar as symbolic power relies on submission to dominant points of view, and to accepting and internalizing those points of view, LGBT collective identities can be recast as something other than the product of unequal negotiations: they are the product of symbolic domination and submission to dominant visions of justice and strategy as I described above in my discussion of habitus and symbolic power. Hints of these dynamics can be found in Tom Warner’s detailed account of Canadian queer activism, particularly in the experience of lesbians in gay male-dominated movement organizations. Warner cites lesbian activists’ sense of loneliness, isolation and powerlessness within movement groups and, tellingly, their frustration at ‘the conditioning that makes us collude with men in discounting our own experience, our own skills, that makes us feel strangers to power and the use of money’ (Christine Donald, cited in Warner, 2002, p. 176). Elsewhere, Warner implicitly links socioeconomic status to interest, as for example in the flooding of the liberationist Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario with lawyers, civil servants and professionals interested in relationship recognition, in contrast to lesbians and gays of color, those on low incomes and those with disabilities (Warner, 2002, pp. 219 –225). A Bourdieuian analysis of the history of the ‘influx’ of professionals into grassroots liberationist organizations could be expected to uncover manifestations of symbolic violence in the form of an often unarticulated sense
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that something has gone wrong, that the debate had shifted or the rug had been pulled out from under early organizers.4 Importantly, the shifting of the debate, the reorientation of movement goals was not necessarily the product of a reasoned, objectively reached consensus, though it may have had that formal appearance. Jane Ward provides an insightful analysis of how symbolic violence can operate within movement organizations when there is an influx of ‘skilled’ professionals bearing significant amounts of cultural and symbolic power through her analysis of the depoliticization of the Christopher Street West Pride Celebration in Los Angeles. She traces how, when the festival ran into financial and operational difficulties, the predominantly working-class board was made to feel unskilled, unprofessional and unworthy of municipal funding for the pride festivities. Note, however, that skill, professionalism and financial responsibility are far cries from alternative measures of what a pride board should have. Queers and liberationists, for example, might be expected to value a board member’s capacity for community inclusion, their independent thinking and commitment to organizational autonomy as well as progressive and liberatory political commitments. Nonetheless, Ward’s Bourdieuian analysis of the class conflict around the organization of pride celebrations in West Hollywood found that middle- and upper-class efforts to match expressions of pride to their own consumer lifestyles have been articulated as a fundamentally apolitical desire for professionalism in pride festival organization. The result was part of a broader trend wherein pride celebrations are becoming decreasingly political (Ward, 2003, p. 89). Queer activists have reason to resist this depoliticization and therefore benefit from analyses such as Ward’s that point to how depoliticization is rendered invisible by organizational shifts legitimated by concerns for professionalism and financial responsibility, and supported by community accession to a vision of pride celebrations as mere cultural festivals that ought to be professionally managed. Importantly, shifts in movement goals and strategies cannot entirely be attributed to the differences in habitus and cultural capital of movement participants. Indeed, Tom Warner’s analysis also points to the ways in which the assimilationist orientation of professionals within the movement, much to the chagrin of liberationists, resonated with: . . . a deep-rooted desire on the part of individual gays, lesbians, and bisexuals—still reviled and viewed as deviant—to achieve mainstream respectability and legitimacy, to have same-sex relationships seen as the same as heterosexual ones —as conventional families—and to be valued in the same way. It was a powerful motivator for the masses of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who were not politically aware and who had no analysis beyond wanting to make their lives better and to have discrimination removed. (2002, p. 231) This observation captures the collusion intrinsic to symbolic violence. The flip side of a concern for depoliticization and assimilation is a concern for the ways in which acceding to dominant points of view, norms and patterns of interaction can relieve suffering in the short run and improve an otherwise dominated position. As Lawler argues, there is a paradoxical relationship between submission and resistance that emerges from Bourdieu’s analysis: if a person’s social identity meets with reproach and disapproval (which is to say, symbolic violence), then it seems obvious that adjusting how they inhabit that identity might diminish their exposure to symbolic violence. In discussing working-class women’s efforts to negotiate their subordinated social position, Lawler asks rhetorically,
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‘How liberating is it to have your clothes, your speech, your appearance vilified? On the other hand, how liberating is it to cast off these marks of difference and to adopt a normalized (middle-class) habitus?’ (2004, p. 122). She argues that while adopting a normalized habitus might be liberating for the individual, it can hardly be expected to promote systematic transformation to relations of symbolic power. The deep-rooted desire for recognition held by mainstream gays and lesbians reflects accession to the dominant distribution of symbolic power and motivates adopting normalized habitus to reduce the distinctions between gay and lesbian individuals and symbolically more valued heterosexuals. In this way, symbolic power in the form of a willingness to gain psychic comfort through improved social position functioned as a resource to bolster the new professionals Warner identifies. The result is a twofold operation of symbolic power: disparities in symbolic and cultural capital among participants in movement organizations are bolstered by the willingness of LGBT people outside those organizations to conform to the existing rules for accumulating symbolic capital. To summarize, the Bourdieuian notion of symbolic power provides the grounds for an alternative version to the typical critique of mainstream gay and lesbian politics as assimilationist projects submitting to the normalizing power of the capitalist state. In broad strokes, the Bourdieuian version would suggest that access to rights—particularly in terms of marriage rights—provides opportunities for accumulating symbolic capital and thereby improving the position of gays and lesbians in social space. This accords with the strategically legitimate but ultimately conformist approach Lawler identifies as a paradoxical implication of the operation of symbolic power. However, the conformism behind rights-based strategies for accumulating symbolic power is problematic insofar as its success depends on devaluing the queer cultural forms, sexual practices, modes of intimacy and approaches to family and community-building that lie behind the queer ethical impulse I described in the introduction. One normative commitment behind this critique is that if LGBT or queer politics are to be meaningful, if they are to be a politics that is about more than simply making life a bit better for a few privileged LGBT people, then mobilization ought to be oriented toward the realization of a social space characterized by a more egalitarian distribution of material and symbolic resources, including recognition for queer cultural forms and practices. Indeed, with hindsight we can now see that assimilationist and conformist strategies within LGBT mobilization have oriented movement participants not only toward heterosexual relationship and familial norms but also neoliberal social and political organization generally and toward the exploitation, environmental degradation and inequality that accompanies neoliberalism (Richardson, 2005). As I argue in the next section, realization of anti-assimilationist and anti-neoliberal mobilization would require a particular relationship between social space and habitus. After all, the fundamental precondition for the operation of symbolic power is that particular habitus-bearing agents oriented within specific social spaces recognize the distinctions symbolic power mobilizes. Ethical Implications: A Realist Vision of Collective Identity In the remaining section, I explore the normative implications of the argument I have been developing by arguing for a vision of social movements themselves as a site of justice, which implies a proceduralist account of justice and demands identifying and developing specific movement mechanisms.
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Understanding collective identity in terms of domination immediately presents a twofold conceptual challenge: how do we identify domination/submission and on what grounds can we say that movements arising from patterns of domination are distorted or not? Symbolic domination depends on the internalization of the dominant point of view by those who do not benefit from that vision. That is, symbolic power rests on the incorporation and naturalization of schemes of classification by which social space is constructed and perceived and the unequal distribution of resources those classifications engender. These schemes are incorporated and naturalized by both individuals and groups who benefit from unequal distributions and those who do not. The existence of external measures capable of assessing the extent to which adopting a particular point of view or scheme of classification is in accordance with, or in opposition to, one’s interests is an important problem for normative social theory and indicates an important tension. On the one hand, most queers— that is, those who seek to resist imperatives to live according to standards of ‘normalcy’— would be rightly suspicious of an externally derived conception of justice given the horrors realized through 20th century revolutionary and utopian movements. At the same time, there appears to be exactly such an external, moral standard operating in accusations that mainstream gays and lesbians who accumulate symbolic capital through strategies based on conforming to, as opposed to resisting, dominant patterns of symbolic power are misguided, traitorous, complicit in entrenching relations of power and so on.5 Treating the sites of collective identity formation—social movement organizations, movement media and so on—as sites of justice can help resolve this tension. More specifically, by extending Bourdieu’s realist philosophy of science to social movement politics, justice could be conceived according to procedural rather than substantive measures. The point would not be to ask whether a movement goal or outcome sufficiently moves the movement toward the universal because it adequately represents the interests of all affected participants, but to ask whether there are procedural mechanisms in place within the process of collective identity formation. Researchers would ask whether and to what degree, in the struggle over a vision of the world, a vision that explains queer difference and the exclusions that difference suffers and articulates that assessment to specific goals and strategies, epistemic violence in the form of symbolic violence replaced rational deliberation. Researchers can take seriously the various stakes and interests involved in partisan debates internal to social movements, assess internal movement outcomes and draw clear conclusions about processes of domination without relying on external, theoretical judgments about objective interests. Put another way, the normative issues of democratic theory, particularly in terms of epistemic violence and epistemic injustice need to account for symbolic power in processes of collective identity construction. The interim task then becomes to identify procedural mechanisms capable of obstructing the operation of symbolic power within collective identity production as Bourdieu believed was the case in scientific and academic fields. Such mechanisms go beyond most deliberative accounts of democratic practice in that they would not assume a universal capacity or disposition to engage whatever mechanisms are instituted in a uniform way.6 In light of the conceptual relationship between habitus and field described above, procedural mechanisms ought to focus on precisely that relationship and on forcing participants to align pursuit of symbolic capital with pursuit of the universal. Thus, collective identity procedures must include both mechanisms to ensure that the universal is the object of symbolic struggle within movement fields (as opposed to treating movements as the vehicle for promoting an already-established conception of the universal, such as the
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universal ‘right’ to marry) and promote the presence of habitus disposed to sublimating subjective interests and drives in order to participate in the struggle over the universal.
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Conclusion I have linked three conceptual moments: Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic power, his realist approach to scientific advance and the process of collective identity formation. Doing so has allowed me to articulate a distinction between existing approaches to understanding collective identities and a Bourdieu-inspired understanding of collective identities as sites of domination and submission, a distinction I then applied in a preliminary way to LGBT/Q organizing. Social movement research interested in collective identities ought to take seriously the relationship between domination within collective identity processes and the symbolic and other resources that underpin those processes. Analysts would be explanatorily better off, but would also have normative measures of assessing movements in terms of their relationships to broader patterns of domination. By thus expanding what we consider to be outcomes within social movement politics, we can develop a more sophisticated understanding of the resources, opportunities and structural blockages that shape those processes. This paper ends, however, with an abstract conception of procedural mechanisms capable of obstructing epistemic violence within collective identity processes. Mechanisms ought to be capable of forcing participants to sublimate their individual symbolic interests in pursuit of the universal and fostering habitus disposed to recognizing the legitimacy and value of those mechanisms. Future research should specify these mechanisms and the processes by which such habitus could be fostered, through a combination of theoretical extrapolation and empirical study of strategies currently and historically employed by movement organizations. Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The author would like to thank Eleanor MacDonald for pushing him to expand his approach to understanding identity politics. The author is also grateful to the four anonymous reviewers of this article for their detailed and insightful comments.
Notes 1. Endress (2005) raises serious questions about the validity of Bourdieu’s criticisms of phenomenologically based sociology. Endress argues that Bourdieu did not go as far beyond the phenomenological tradition he criticized as he imagined and, indeed, that Bourdieu premised his criticisms on flawed readings of Schutz, Berger and Luckmann and others. 2. See Emirbayer and Mische (1998) for an important attempt to disentangle agency from its structural and phenomenological contexts. 3. Transgender people and their allies commonly use ‘cisgender’ to indicate people who identify as the sex/ gender they were assigned at birth. Avoiding ‘non-trans’ or equivalent expressions refuses to naturalize cisgender people and thereby mark out transgender people as deviant or ‘other’. 4. Warner expresses such a sentiment about the movement for relationship recognition generally (1999, p. 84). 5. See Lukes (2005, pp. 144 –151) for a discussion of the difficulties of externally establishing ‘objective’ interests. 6. For a good introduction to debates about deliberative democracy, see Gutmann and Thompson (2004).
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Chris Samuel received his PhD from Queen’s University’s Department of Political Studies and is currently researching labour movement issues in Toronto, Canada. His research extends Bourdieu’s social theory to the study of social movements and has previously published analyses of G20 protest strategies.
