Bourdieu on Love: A Latent Capital, a Primary Field and a New Research Agenda

This paper offers an elaboration and reconstruction of Pierre Bourdieu’s brief account of interpersonal love in Masculine Domination. Although Bourdieu presented love as a possibility of escape from relations of domination, he also understood that love was a product of labour, inserted within an economy of exchanges, and liable to become infused with domination. I build on these remarks to make the case that it is possible to conceive of love becoming a form of ‘capital’ operative within fields of intimate relations. Two substantial consequences flow from this move. First, it gives specificity to a species of field that has a threefold primacy over all others. Second, it throws into sharp relief the fact that what a person does in one field is contextualised by their location in many fields. Both moves widen the scope of Bourdieusian research considerably by pushing it into new intellectual territory and deepening its explanatory capacity.