By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Lunds Civila Ryttarforening, LCR, is one of Sweden’s largest equestrian clubs with its facilities located in between Norra Faladen to the north and LTH to the south. To the west of the horse facilities is “Smorlyckans Idrottsplats” with football pitches, tennis courts, a Jujutsu club and a Home Guard’s building. The club has approximately 500 weekly riders and offers a wide range of activities within the the riding school, as well as stalls for private horses. Discussions on whether the equestrian centre should be relocated or not have reached a standstill as it has been going on for about 50 years. I believe that if LCR is to stay on its current site it can not continue to be an island. Therefore this project is an investigation into how the centre could be developed meeting and integrating with its surroundings. As much as the horse is the centre of the stable and the equestrian sport it’s also the centre of this project. “When Species Meet” is a what-if scenario on what could happen if we plan for the horse and who else that could benefit from that. In addition to the architectural proposal, one major question with the project has been to develop my own method and investigate how it’s possible to keep a high rate of complexity when working with a project. This is something I have done by taking the position of the horse instead of the architect. This change of position has provided me with a possibility to see the site, with all its opportunities, from a perspective that I couldn’t have without the horse. Therefore, this project is also a try on how it could be possible to take on other projects by relocating my investigation to several other positions relevant for those projects. (Less)

When Species Meet

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion

Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and Darren Aronofsky’s\nBlack Swan (2010) are films about women directed by men. Both films unorthodoxly\nchart women artists’ struggle with the discipline imposed on them by\nthe arts and by their live-in mothers. By portraying mothers as their daughters’\noppressors, both films disturb the naïve “women = victims and men = perpetrators”\nbinary. Simultaneously, they deploy audiovisual violence to exhibit the\nviolence of society’s gender and sexuality policy norms and use gender-coded\nromance narratives to subvert the same gender codes from within this gender\ndiscourse. Using Judith Butler’s and Michael Foucault’s theories, we argue\nthat Haneke and Aronofsky “do” feminism unconventionally by exposing the\nnexus of women’s complicity with omnipresent societal power structures that\nsafeguard gender norms. These films showcase women concurrently as victim-products\nand complicit partisans of socially constructed gender ideology to\nemphasize that this ideology can be destabilized only when women “do” their\ngender and sexuality differently through acts of subversion.

“Undoing” Gender: Nexus of Complicity and Acts of Subversion in The Piano Teacher and Black Swan

Attitudes towards sexuality are changing and levels of cultural homophobia decreasing, yet there remain very few openly gay men within sport. As a proving ground for heteromasculinity, sport has traditionally been a hostile environment for gay men. This article is based on an ethnographic study within a sporting subworld in which gay men do appear to be accepted: equestrian sport. Drawing on inclusive masculinity theory, equestrian sport is shown to offer an unusually tolerant environment for gay men in which heterosexual men of all ages demonstrate low levels of homophobia. Inclusive masculinity theory is a useful framework for exploring the changing nature of masculinities and this study demonstrates that gay men are becoming increasingly visible and accepted within once unreceptive locales, such as sport and rural communities. However, this more tolerant attitude is purchased at the expense of a subordinated feminine Other, perpetuating the dominance of men within competitive sport. © The Author(s) 2012.

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‘Dressage Is Full of Queens!’ Masculinity, Sexuality and Equestrian Sport:

Mentoring is widely acknowledged to be an important contributor to women’s career success and progression but women often struggle to access mentoring networks that can help sponsor and develop their careers. Formal mentoring programmes designed specifically for women help overcome this challenge, but such schemes may at the same time reinforce masculine discourses which position women as deficient in relation to the invisibly male norm that is implicit within contemporary working practices. Drawing on a formal women-only mentoring programme built on gender-positive goals to empower women to ‘be the best they can be’ within the events industry, this paper considers the extent to which such programmes can both challenge and reproduce gendered discourses of business and success. Interviews with mentors and mentees illustrate how such programmes make gender visible within business and individual careers, but masculinist underpinnings of organisational discourses remain invisible, unacknowledged and thus largely unchallenged.

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Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women-only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace

Sex segregation is a core organising principle of most modern sports and is a key element in the marginalisation and subordination of girls and women in sport and beyond. In this article I explore the only Olympic-level sport which is not organised around sex segregation – equestrian sport – in order to consider the implications of sex integration for female participants. I draw on a study conducted on elite riders that found that although sex integration in equestrian sport does not lead to female participants being excluded from high-level competition, men continue to perform disproportionately well. This suggests that although sex integration may be an important step towards breaking down gender hierarchies in sport, without accompanying wider changes in gender norms and expectations, sex integration alone will not be enough to achieve greater gender equality in equestrian sport.

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Together, yet Still Not Equal? Sex Integration in Equestrian Sport.

The horse-human relationship is based on mutual respect and understanding, and the development of trusting partnerships may be particularly important in elite equestrian sport, where horses and humans rely on each other to tackle sporting challenges. The increasing commercialization of equestrian sport is eroding aspects of the horse-human relationship, as the commodity value of sports horses increases and the pressure for quick results threatens the formation of deep bonds between horse and rider. This article presents data from an ethnographic study of competitive equestrian sport in England, including interviews with 26 elite riders, to explore how the changing nature of elite equestrian sport is altering the basis of the horse-human relationship, changing the horse from a trusted partner in sporting pursuits to a commodity to be bought and sold for human commercial benefit.

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Tools of the Trade or Part of the Family? Horses in Competitive Equestrian Sport

Riding, training and caring for horses are visceral experiences that require the immersion of both body and mind. This book provides an in-depth understanding of human–horse relationships and interactions as embodied in equestrian sport and leisure. 

As a closely focused ethnographic study of the horse world, it explores the key themes of partnership and collaboration in human–horse communication, the formation of individual and collective identities performed through involvement in the horse world, and human–horse interaction as an embodied way of being. This book argues that encounters between humans and horses can reveal the ways that human society has been and continues to be structured through intersection with nonhuman others. Equestrian sport and leisure provides an apt context for considering how such concepts of interspecies communication and collaboration are negotiated, managed, (mis)understood and performed, resulting in a uniquely embodied way of knowing and being in the world. 

Human–Animal Relationships in Equestrian Sport and Leisure is fascinating reading for anyone interested in equestrianism, human-animal studies, theories of embodiment, the sociology of sport, or sport and social theory.

Katherine Dashper

Papers

‘Dressage Is Full of Queens!’ Masculinity, Sexuality and Equestrian Sport:

Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women-only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace

Together, yet Still Not Equal? Sex Integration in Equestrian Sport.

Tools of the Trade or Part of the Family? Horses in Competitive Equestrian Sport

Human-Animal Relationships in Equestrian Sport and Leisure