Exchanging a coat of shreds and patches for the whole cloth of Bourdieu

In recent years postructuralist feminism, with its emphasis on the importance of discourse, has emerged as an important theoretical framework for analysing the place of gender in both labour history and the sociology of education, a framework which assumes agency within constraint, historical specificity and the non-unitary subject. It is argued that at present no satisfactory action theory exists for interpreting empirical findings in these areas within this framework, and that such a theory needs to accommodate both the discourse analysis advocated by poststructualist feminism and the emphasis on "practice" in the work on gender in educational settings of those using concepts taken from humanist marxism. It is suggested that Pierre Bourdieu's theorisation of the logic of practice, if applied in the area of gender, would provide an action theory which encompasses both discourse and practice and which could be used to examine the dynamics of gender construction and reproduction within the broad conceptualisation of the social advocated by postructuralist feminism.