Embodying Habitus
An Investigation into the Processes of Formation and Recognition of Gender Identity
Prof.ssa Chiara Cappelletto, Università degli Studi di Milano
Vittoria Sisca, PhD student, Università degli Studi di Milano
The term habitus refers to the set of perceptions and practical tendencies that social agents acquire through their repeated interactions with objects, practices, and institutions. To embody a habitus means developing stable and lasting ways of acting and moving that make an agent recognizable as part of a specific social group.
Embodying Habitus uses the phenomenological perspective, placed in dialogue with the pragmatist orientation and the sociology of practice, to explore how agents take on dispositions as they are embodied, which shape their gender identity and guide how they perform it.
The project also examines how these embodied dispositions connect to the ability of social agents to make themselves recognizable through their distinctive traits: bodily traits, such as posture, facial expressions, tone of voice, or accent, and environmental traits, such as the bodies and objects with which they surround themselves.
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