The habitus

My definition of the habitus is you. In that sense of how you carry yourself in society, how you were growing up and what your family situation is. It's just how you grew up and turned into what you are today. Habitus is a new concept to me, but it makes sense when you think about it, the idea that habitus is just a sense of you, and it changes between class structure and between people. The one thing in Pierre Bourdieu reading Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) that stood out to me was the idea that it's "impossible for all members of the same class ... to have had the same experiences, in the same order, it is certain that each member of the same class is more likely than any member of another class to have been confronted with the situations most frequent for the members of that class." While it's possible to have the same experiences, it's certainly not the same for every person. 

Coming out as pansexual and genderqueer didn't offer me the same experiences that many others have had. I have a family that loves me regardless of who I'm attracted to or who I see myself, I never experienced any major bullying on any part (considering I came out after high school just so I didn't deal with the bullying that I could've faced). Whereas many others I know dealt with bullying or there were some extremes where they would be kicked out of their homes or faced some sort of discrimination. I've been through one divorce as a child and I'm going through one as an adult (the same parent getting divorced too), and I don't experience the same as someone else might, or I might have the same feelings as someone but it maybe didn't happen as fast, or slow, or whatnot as someone else. 

My aesthetic in terms of habitus and writing is the way I'll write for different audiences, how I write for academic audiences and how I write for me in my novel drafts and how I write stories for my friends. I'll write certain words one way and certain words another way. If I have an essay due and I can't think of words to hit the word count, I'll double up on words to sound nicer. In my fiction writing, I'll write about people with parental issues, early on (when I still was mad at my dad) my stories would involve either divorced parents, or someone with father problems or the dad just not being in the picture. Now, my stories really rely on either a character with a single Mum, parents who are together but aren't happy, or just no mention of parents all together. I always have some sort of multi-cultural characters who are different sexualities because if everyone was straight white wo/men it certainly wouldn't represent my world, sure I live on the Peninsula where you'll find more white people than any other race, but I visit the city often, I go into suburbs with higher counts of multi-cultural, I have friends who aren't just white. It would be a disservice to many if I just wrote white people. 

As for what I believe is good or bad writing, I personally feel like purple prose is bad writing (even though I admitted to it just a few seconds ago), I'm not too sure what I'd see as good writing though, and I believe this is more of a philosophical question to ask. What's is good writing. That's the question. I personally don't believe 50 shades of Grey is good writing, but others might see it as groundbreaking. In terms of good writing on social values, no spelling mistakes, weird grammar and punctuation, just generally a good source of what sounds like a sentence. This might change in a few years and I might have an actual finite answer for you, but for right now I can't think of much.

Personally, I feel like I could change through the use of education, I believe education can change the habitus of someone. So by re-structuring my habitus would be to read more Australian/Australian Aboriginal authors, or go somewhere in Victoria that makes me want to write about so I'd re-structure my habitus by finally writing something about Australia, rather than write a story set in America, or elsewhere. I feel like my habitus is being changed with what this course is about, and what I'm learning about Hong Kong. 

During my studies at RMIT, I've gone to more writing festivals, I certainly didn't feel like doing this during my first writing course, and I didn't do it last year, but I've realised how important it is to learn from others and to learn how to create better. I've been to the Emerging Writer's Festival and listened to more Aboriginal Australians speak about how they write, I went to talk about writing better queer characters (with myself as queer, I know I can better write asexual and demisexual characters better), and I hope to go to the Melbourne Writers Festival to again, engage with writers and to learn better ways of telling a story. 

Habitus is important, and it helps us grow as people, and as a society to learn where certain situations come from.