The concept of domination in Political Sociology was undermined by Max Weber, who distinguished it from that of power, highlighting its plural and, exquisitely, political nature; inevitably linked to the pathetic and value-based dimension of the social actor or the form of government that exercises it.
The current era is a melting pot of practices of domination: political, symbolic, iconological, iconoclastic, and, finally, social and cultural. It's enough to analyze the most recent episodes concerning the condition of total subordination of Afghan women or the dominant practices imposed on Iranian women; the multiple practices of social control, persistent and reiterated, enacted against minorities, migrants, and all those who, according to "developmentalist" rhetoric, should "stay at home," or against young people considered idlers and overgrown children by an increasingly unfit society.
Male dominance today
A subtle rule, concealed by benevolent intentions and paternalistic rhetoric, the product of narrative devices that characterize every argument of those in power. Women denied in Afghanistan, censored images, annihilated identities, but also femicides, slavery, prostitution of the most vulnerable; deaths at sea, and political disquisitions regarding migrant management policies, inexorably anchored to the political spectrum in power.
Domination knows neither gender nor nationality. Born with colonialism, it was established with the rhetoric of the most modern forms of government. In fact, it follows history. In this regard, Bourdieu reminds us, it is " historically structured ." It follows the chronological logic of time and is contingent, so much so that it adapts to every form of social system.
Symbolic violence for Bourdieu
The ethnography conducted by the French sociologist, published in 1998 by Seuil, in the text titled " Masculine Domination ," best explains this assumption. Investigating the definition of social roles related to gender identities among the Kabyles of Algeria, Bourdieu unravels their dominant and historically constructed nature. Women were dedicated to the simplest and most vulgar tasks, while men best represented male domination, through symbolic violence designed to emphasize their place in the world; flaunting virility and strength.
Symbolic violence, incorporated as " structuring structures " and introjected habits , to paraphrase the sociologist, pervades every form of social reality and practice. Today more than ever, we are at the mercy of practices of symbolic and political violence. But what is symbolic violence in the context presented by Bourdieu?
« It is the form of paradoxical submission […] The symbolic violence that must be, apparently, sweet and natural ».
A symbolically connoted domain
This applies to both men and women, whose position in the world of the Algerian Berbers can be traced back to a reciprocity of being, since the male has also well incorporated and is a victim of this structuring of gender and social roles: " Male privilege is also a trap and has its counterpart in the permanent tension and conflict, sometimes pushed to the point of absurdity, that every man feels imposed on him by the duty to affirm his virility in any circumstance. Everything thus conspires to make the impossible ideal of virility the principle of an immense vulnerability that leads, paradoxically, to an investment, sometimes frantic, in all male games of violence such as, in our societies, sports and, in particular, those most suited to producing visible signs of masculinity and to manifesting and proving the qualities of the virile, such as sports based on a direct physical background (pp. 62-63)."
A reciprocal agency between male and female actors, who construct social practices structured by society and externalize them to the third recipient subject, and by reiterating it over time, they preserve and further structure it in the social and collective imagination to which they belong. A symbolically connoted domination, which pertains to the social and domestic dimension, since the primary form of domination is the family, Bourdieu reminds us.
Symbolic and political violence
But today, what is the most marked form of symbolic and political violence and male domination in the national and international context?
Undoubtedly, the obligation to wear a veil and comply with the dictates imposed by the militias in power in the Middle East; opposing body images as if they were trophies, as "modern" influencers do on social media ; improvising as haters and gratuitously offending others through the pages of the most recent apps, which represent the degeneration of the Homme blasé of Simmelian memory; again, unconditionally judging the choices of others and the life of the generalized Other, only because the ethnocentrism dominant in the mind of Homo ludens authorizes him to feel superior.
Labeling others because they come from a country other than Italy, because of their skin color, or because of their social status ; rejecting an ostentatious model, typical of nineteenth-century society (Veblen), only to re-propose it, time and again, to define social identities and scales of an anachronistic system; identifying themselves as strong and virile, while perpetuating physical, sexual, psychological, and verbal violence against women, who are increasingly alone and prey to the ravages of certain beasts; but domination transcends the nuclear relational dimension and extends to the workplace.
It's well known that the gender gap that characterizes all workplaces, particularly in Italy, determines who should be at the top of a company and who shouldn't, making such decision-making dependent on gender. Furthermore, forms of domination and symbolic and political violence can be found in the argumentative rhetoric of certain inclusivist governments that, in effect, ban women from all forms of power, along with the propagandistic rhetoric of certain slogans that are anything but dedicated to women's empowerment , but rather to their liminal position on the social hierarchy of identities.
Valeria Salanitro
