A field is simply a social system of relations between individuals or institutions who are competing for the same stake. An example of a field may be higher education, colleges, and universities. Habitus is a set of potential dispositions, an internalized set of taken-for-granted rules that govern strategies, and social practices that individuals in some respects carry with them into any field. There is a system of unspoken rules and generally unspeakable rules. They are unspeakable because it is understood that it would be rude or socially punishable to try to talk about those rules. Or, in some cases individuals within a habitus cannot even articulate those arbitrary rules because they are unaware of them. That is, these rules may feel so natural and normalized that they seem as though they are the way things should be and always have been. An example of an unspeakable rule might be that a person should never discuss class privilege, as opposed to hard work, as contributing to the success of an individual when talking about the accomplishments of the middle class within a middle-class field. However, within a working-class field of manual laborers, this may not be a forbidden topic of discussion. Judith Butler outlined a feminist theory of embodied practice in identity formation. She stated that our sense of identities is formed through repeated daily and everyday constrained and emancipatory performative practices through our bodies. Through the process of repeated performances, ways of being in the world become sedimented, that is layered and accumulated to the extent that these practices become a part of who we are and how we perceive ourselves to be in the world. Butler’s insights about performativity, the body, and identity are particularly informative of working-class identity formations that are literally embodied within the physical capacity to do manual labor. Butler’s notion of performative identity gives me insight into my own identity development and the discomforts and constraints I have felt within academia, where the mind is privileged over the body in ways that almost obliterate the body. At the same time, the ideology of mind over body seems hypocritical when one examines the class distinctions made through the embedded middle-class practices, in short, the habitus, of the majority of university professors. Many first-generation college students in my classes, especially those who are from working-class backgrounds, report shock, dismay, and anger at the level of classism and racism that exists among faculty, whom they assumed to be educated and to value egalitarian principles. Many students express their frustration at not knowing the habitus of the middle class, yet feel its exclusionary, embodied power. They express even more frustration that the middle class also seems unaware of its own unspoken rules and habitus. Though they can start a conversation about race, they don’t know how to talk about class in a meaningful way, one that helps their fellow students to understand the naturalized class distinctions within our culture. Class is America’s dirty little secret. A habitus is different from a field in that it

A. is a more modern concept about social class.
B. refers to the underlying rules in a social system.
C. has a more ambiguous reference than a field.
D. assumes a great significance within social relations.