Social institutions and critique to the notion of feminine: dialoguing with Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu and Gabriel Tarde

Abstract

The critique of the notion of Feminine is no isolated question in Deleuze's thought. Considering different conceptual connections accross his works and their similarity with ideas brought upon by authors from different backgrounds, we argue that the Feminine can be thought of in an original way, far from usual naturalisations of common sense. In this research, we aim at showing some dialogue between Deleuze and the sociologists Bourdieu and Tarde. From a general point of view, Bourdieu's sociology could be said "too molar" to "seduce" Deleuze, as suggested by Sasso and Villani (2003) with respect to the idea of a social construction of the Feminine and the relation of disqualification between genders. However, Bourdieu's microanalytical look can help us explore the subtleness of habits, practices and symbologies that reproduce a certain idea of the Feminine accross different time periods. Moreover, if Bourdieu helps us enriching our reading of Deleuze, bringing the concrete and urgent problem of the domination women are facing in an androcentrical social organisation to some themes in his philosophy (like the capture of desiring production, biopolitical controls, socio-historical processes of subjectivation), we think Deleuze can also give tools to the reading of Bourdieu's texts, in order to rethink the question at stake, beyond supposed social determinisms, once discovered and understood his producive, irreductible molecularity, under binarities of the big structures. The possibility of this dialogue between these authors gets even more consistent once considered how relevant Deleuze judged Tarde's microsociology, the partnership of which is an important intercession in order to think the Feminine as a historical product originated in a determinate confluence between unconscious streams and social organisations at work.