교환과 상징적 폭력: 부르디외의 논의를 중심으로

Exchange of Women and Symbolic Violence: Reading Bourdieu's Masculine Domination

This paper analyzes political implications of women's commodification and studies the ways in which the exchange of women are theorized. We cannot immediately equate women's commodification and women's exchange. But the practical function of woman as an article to be exchanged for political, cultural, and economic values implies that these values superimposed on woman create an economy mediated through such an exchange. Even outside the immediate periphery of physical exchange of women's bodies, such an economy of women's value places women as social beings within the realm of symbolic exchange. Therefore, we need to continue studying the functions performed by woman as an exchangeable object, as well as the characteristics and problems of the social economy which relies on those functions. In this paper, I first review the existing theoretical viewpoints regarding these matters--those of Claude L?vi-Strauss and Gayle S. Rubin--in order to re-evaluate their insights as well as to point out their limitations. Then I go into Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of gender politics and the economy of exchanging women, focusing on his Masculine Domination. Bourdieu's theory partly builds upon the works of L?vi-Strauss and Rubin, but differentiates itself by approaching the inequality between the sexes through a view that encompasses the economy of non-economic, i. e., symbolic, elements. The central points that ground Bourdieu's discussion are the notion of "symbolic violence," its corporealization, and the "paradox of doxa." This paper seeks a possibility of resistance in theoretical reflection. A critical examination of how the body paradoxically incorporates and conforms to the problematic ways in which power exerts itself, as Bourdieu explains, and of how such an explanation applies to women's commodified position today will be a necessary step to envisioning a practicable alternative to the reality of masculine domination.