Masculine domination is so deeply ingrained in our unconscious that we hardly perceive all of its dimensions. It is so much in line with our expectations that we struggle to call it fully into question. Pierre Bourdieu's ethnographic analysis of gender divisions in Kabyle society, as a living reservoir of the Mediterranean cultural tradition, provides a potent instrument for disclosing the symbolic structures of the androcentric unconscious which survives in the men and women of our own societies.

Bourdieu analyses masculine domination as a paradigmatic form of symbolic violence - the kind of gentle, invisible, pervasive violence which is exercised through cognition and misrecognition, knowledge and sentiment, often with the unwitting consent of the dominated. To understand this form of domination we must analyse both its invariant features and the historical work of dehistoricization through which social institutions - family, school, church, state - eternalize the arbitrary at the root of men's power. This analysis leads directly to the political question: can we neutralize the mechanisms through which history is continuously turned into nature, thereby freeing the forces of change and accelerating the incipient transformations of the relations between the sexes?

This new book by Pierre Bourdieu - which has been a bestseller in France - will be essential reading for students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities and for anyone concerned with questions of gender, sexuality and power.

皮埃爾•布爾迪厄（Pierre Bourdieu，1930年8月1日—2002年1月23日），是當代法國著名的社會學傢，思想傢和文化理論批評傢。1954年他畢業於巴黎高等師範學院，1956年應徵入伍，在阿爾及利亞服役兩年。1964年迴到巴黎，於1975年創辦《社會科學研究行動》（Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales）。1982年成為法蘭西學院唯一的社會學教授，社會科學高等學院（Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales）學術總監。主要著作有《實踐理論大綱》《藝術的規則》《帕斯卡式的沉思》《男性統治》《區隔》等。