In the Name of the Law: The "Female Homosexual" and the Criminal Code in Fin de Siecle Germany

Abstract

In a sociological study of what he called juridical field, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu portrayed law as quintessential form ofthe sym? bolic power of naming that creates things it names, individuals and social groups in particular. It confers upon reality which arises from its classificatory operations maximum permanence that any social entity has power confer upon another, Bourdieu wrote, the permanence which we attribute objects. In Bourdieu's schema, law takes on this privileged status because of its claim universal validity, exceeding limited social or professional contexts of most utterances. The law claims speak both for state that underwrites it and for individuals that comprise state. Yet if Bourdieu granted legal language this privileged status in produc? tion and organization of names and categories, he nevertheless insisted that operations of law are not sui generis. It would not be excessive, he explained, to say that [law] creates social world, but only if we remem? ber that it is this world which first creates law. That is, categories can be consecrated by law only if they make sense historically constituted individuals and social world which they pertain.1 If language?and espe? cially legal language?carries what Bourdieu referred as a quasi-magical