Masculine Domination

Rating:
Summary: high powered thinking
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: What on earth does 'anamnesis' or 'sociodicy' mean?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Misandry, Ignrorance and Heterophobia
Review: 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.