Breaking habitus, (re)orienting roads. Emerging sexual practices and identities as subversive resistances to patriarchal sexual order

Abstract

This article tries to analyze from a feminist perspective the ruptures of patriarchal sexual order that emerge in the sexual relations of feminist activists, LGTBIQ+ activists, and men in favor of equality in Southern Basque Country. This article aims to identify some aspects of participants’ sexuality that constitute subversive resistances to the hegemonic sexual norm; for this, we have relied on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, on Ahmed’s orientation, and on Foucault’s resistance. We have interrelated these concepts to affirm that the ruptures of the dominant sexual order contemplated in the article (the fluidity of identity, the questioning of heteronormativity and monogamy, and the reinvention of a non-coitocentric sexuality), constitute conscious reorientations of the habitus or the sociosymbolic inheritance received in the family, deviations from the way paved by predecessors that act as a resistant power of subversion, capacity and agency.