Reacting to social domination: class, sex and politics in Didier Éribon and Édouard Louis’s autobiographies
Abstract
Inspired by Bourdieu’s sociological autobiography, Retour à Reims (2009) by the sociologist Didier Éribon and En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014) by his twenty-two years old disciple Édouard Louis, give an account of the respective authors’ life experience through the lens of the social and sexual forms of dominations which affected them. Both texts portray the image of working class escapee intellectuals for whom writing is a way to elaborate identity conflicts as well as to meditate upon the relationship between political power and symbolic power. Moreover, these two examples of socio-self-analysis may also be interpreted as a contribution to the public debate which in France is challenged by the political impact of multifaceted identities and by a crisis of the traditional bond between the left and the working class that has been occurring since the Sixties.
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