Prestaciones familiares en su modalidad contributiva

In this section I address the discussion about the body which became a central issue for many scholars of post-structuralism and postmodernism. Taking into account that sexuality (similarly to gender) is a social construct and that it assumes different characteristics in different contexts, the body and the meaning given to it have to be understood as part of the formation of individual and collective identity. The body itself is formed as part of the construction of identity – it becomes an artefact (Arnfred, 2011). Similarly, for Bourdieu (1977), the body is a public object, although experienced privately, formed and known through social practices and discourses. Social practices inscribe norms on the body, creating

114 identities through repetition of cultural practices which prescribe social roles in the community. This structuralist argument is countered by the subjectivity of individuals and their capacity to vary rituals instead of repeating them, and to exercise agency.

In my empirical chapters (Chapter 5, 6 and 7) I present the evidence of how gender and sexual identities were constructed by young people within the domains of family and community, school and church in my research site. The ethnographic data from the ceremony of initiation rites presented in Chapter 6 illustrates in detail the means of becoming ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’, adhering to the tradition. In these processes elders and novices collaborate, with the young person typically imitating the elders in developing the desired values, behaviours and motives necessary to become part of the social community. During the rites the body becomes an artefact, and madrinhas (godmothers), padrinhos (godfathers) and the leader of the ceremony, Baba Joaquin, teach the desirable postures through “repeated stylisation of the body” and performance “within a highly rigid regulatory frame” (Butler, 1990: 33); how to pay respects to elders, how to address members of the family and simply how to act in their company.

Bourdieu describes these practices as bodily hexis which “speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, because it is linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and charged with a host of social meanings and values” (1977: 87). In other words, bodily hexis is the expression of all the factors which make up one’s habitus embodied in our physical being. Habitus predisposes members of a society to interact in ways consistent with the social norms of their group. It is the social, cultural and physical environment that we, as social beings, inhabit, through which we know ourselves and through which others identify us. These dispositions include postures, speech styles, ways of eating, moving, conceptions of private space, predispositions towards particular ways of thinking and feeling – they are habits of orienting one’s physical and psychological selfhood to the world. In the context of a learning moment, this corresponds closely with situated learning.

Reflecting upon my fieldwork I came to recognise the value of Bourdieu’s work on embodiment, and particularly the concepts of habitus and the field, for “understanding the effects of the intersection of symbolic and material dimensions of power upon the body” (McNay, 2000: 26). The experience from the initiation rites reinforcing young people’s cultural identities were not natural but involved “the inscription of dominant social norms or

the ‘cultural arbitrary’ upon the body” (McNay, 2000: 26). For Bourdieu, the temporality inherent in the concept of habitus denotes not just the processes through which norms are inculcated upon the body but also the “moments of praxis or living through of these norms by the individual” (ibid: 26). The relationship between individual habitus and the social circumstances, or field, from which it emerges is “double and obscure” (Bourdieu, 1992: 127). Certainly, through the participation in the rites (and/or other local rituals), young people, mostly subconsciously, internalised certain aspects of gender habitus, and became

deeply invested in the structure of these fields.

For Bourdieu, the temporality inherent to the concepts of habitus denotes not just the process through which norms are inculcated upon the body, but also the moment of praxis or living through of these norms by the individual. In other words, habitus is defined, not as a determining principle, but a generative structure. Initiation rites are thus a moment of active learning in which the habitus is inscribed on the body, which then becomes unconscious. Nevertheless, we perform them without conscious reflection because they are ’obvious’ and ‘commonsensical’. According to Bourdieu, young people particularly are very attentive to physical characteristics – “a way of walking, a tilt of the head, facial expressions, ways of sitting and of using implements” (1977: 87) – this becomes a practical manifestation of one’s relationship to the social world and one’s place in it, which can be actively learned. Although learning takes place in home and in school, it is the habituation – the repeated and affirmed performance of particular repertoires (including cognitive, affective and bodily) – that form the unconscious dispositions of habitus (Bourdieu, 1992).

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, through rules and hidden curricula schools instruct young people about the gender stereotypes to which they should conform. In Chapter 7, I discuss how teachers in particular, as members of the local community, transmit normative ideas or their own beliefs about gender identities to the classroom. In this way gender is above all a matter of everyday interactions and practices that are inseparable from social arrangements in society which in turn are socially reproduced over generations. Butler views this kind of performative54 approach to acquiring identity as very restricted, limiting young people’s opportunity to experiment and manoeuvre (1990). While through performative practices                                                                                                                

54 _{In Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits of “sex” (1993) Butler changes the idea of performativity as related to a}

performance to performativity stemming from linguistics. In this way, linguistic performatives, using forms of speech, bring what they name into being: for example, ‘It’s a girl!’ at a birth brings a girl into being, initiating the process which Butler

116 young people are accepted into the community as respectable members, repetition is also used to resignify and to give new meanings.

In contrast, Moore finds the processes of ‘identification’ and ‘differentiation’ (1994: 2) more important than belonging to a certain category. She raises the issue of how much body praxis, whether understood as bodily hexis or performativity, is an act of self-reflection, and how much room there is for the individual’s agency to experiment. Agency is one of the important aspects of performativity: it allows the possibility of negotiation and manoeuvre and is central to the power processes that I discussed above.

Butler argues that for the subject to be socially constructed does not mean socially determined and hence without agency (Butler, 1990). Rather, since the discursive creation of the self and gender identity takes place within the regime of repetition, processes of gender roles and norms, agency is “located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (ibid: 145). Hence agency is not positioned in the subject’s distance from the gender(ed) discourses that form the subject, but instead in the subject’s capacity to vary – rather than repeat – those constituting discourses. While the new theorisation by Butler considers a more relational perspective on female and male identities examining the inherent complexities of gender norms and the implications for resistance, subversion and the emancipatory remodelling of identity, it does not, according to McNay (2003), provide a theory of agency, but rather, an idea of capacity to conceive and execute one’s actions and projects. Thus, McNay suggests that Butler’s conceptualisation to some degree remains within a paradigm of subjectification that is unable to explain the emergence of agency and subject formation (McNay, 2000; 2003). I now consider the approach McNay (2000) puts forward to overcome the shortcomings of this paradigm.