Content area
Full Text
Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (editors); Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004,
ISBN 1-4051-2395-8
£17.99 (pbk)
The discussions contained in this book began in 2002 at the 'Feminists Evaluate Bourdieu' Conference held at the University of Manchester, and is now luckily available for those who are interested, but missed the conference. This collection of essays shows that even if Bourdieu lacked attention to feminist theories - even though he did explore gender relations - his theoretical apparatus has a relevance to feminism, and can be used to produce new directions in feminist theories. In order to achieve this, the authors of this book neither simply place feminist theories in a Bourdieusian framework nor try to modify his social theory in order to accommodate 'feminist objects', rather they try to 'selectively appropriate' (p. 211) elements of his conceptual apparatus in order to inform their analysis. In this book we find a critical interrogation of Bourdieu's social theory, a working with and against it. Contributors reformulate, expand, map and review some of the crucial concepts of his thought 'to address some of the most pressing issues of our time' and to rework and redefine 'the contours of the social as a new ground for feminist theory' (p. 5), as Lisa Adkins says in her introduction.
Adkins and Beverley Skeggs structured this book in three...