Ensure, Sustain, Multiply: Rearticulating Boundary Permeability via Cultural Capital and Biopower

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 11. Interrogating Analytic Constructs

Abstract

In this paper, I attempt to rearticulate the concept of permeability to reflect its conditions and consequences as a quality which reinforces symbolic boundaries. I analyze the distinguishability of an in-group’s shared characteristics by using Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to understand the communication of competency via tastes, practices, and beliefs. Bourdieu’s explanation of cultural capital’s value as a means of social distinction accounts for the processes by which social groups are categorized and hierarchized. By incorporating Foucault’s theory of biopower, I will go on to explain the incentivization of negotiating permeability as a means of ensuring, sustaining, and multiplying the population of a social group. Foucault’s theory provides valuable insights into the function of permeability as a technique of power by underscoring its role in structuring the desires of the out-group to perform the labor required to accumulate the volume and type of symbolic capital characteristic of the in-group. These two theories also illustrate the restructuring of social space as a whole through the creation of a new distinction between targeted out-group members and those who lack the potential for permeability. This distinction is a result of the social value generated over the scarcity of cultural capital due to an unequal distribution of resource accessibility, and the emergence of this distinction allows for the continued normalization, categorization, and hierarchization of social space. By rearticulating permeability in this way, certain beliefs about the efforts to improve the inclusivity and diversification of various social groups delineated by symbolic boundaries is called into question when considering its role in reproducing distinction and its function as a technique of power.

Author

• Pace Ward, University of Mississippi