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Girls as Elite Distinction: Appropriation and Ownership of Bodily Capital
Abstract
The capital concept has proliferated in studies of culture and stratification, usually depicting individual assets as personal advantages within given fields. Because this approach sidesteps issues of ownership, it obscures how unequal value can be generated through the appropriation of someone else’s capital. Based on fieldwork in the VIP party circuit from New York to Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organizers and guests, I document the uses of women’s bodily capital by men who appropriate women as a symbolic resource to generate profit, status, and social ties in an exclusive circuit of businessmen. I argue that women are unable to capitalize on their bodily capital as effectively through participation in the VIP scene because symbolic boundaries penalize women for strategic intimacy. By shifting the analysis of capital from individual advantages to systemic extra-individualadvantages, this article brings appropriation into the study of culture and class. Further, this article genders the elite by documenting the cultural contradictions of femininity and power in elite men’s social spaces.
Keywords
Ownership, Bodily capital, VIP, Girls, Elites
Words: 14,200 (too long!)
Dear Reader: Thank you for reading this and I’m sorry it’s so long. I really need help on where I can cut to and where the argument needs support. The paper is R&R’d at Poetics, and I’m happy to share reviewer reports and/or the original paper, just email me. There are a few things I need to do to satisfy the reviewers still but not sure how to go about them: 1) clarify if these are really “elites,” and if so, what type? 2) be consistent about the VIP as a field, or circuit, or a scene; right now I try to do it all. As you read, let me know if you buy my argument that this is an elite world and that it is a field.
Introduction
Since the expansion of human capital to account for the cultural foundations of class inequality (Bourdieu 1986), new concepts of cultural capital have proliferated. Some are in response to changes in the world, like changing class structure and hence, emergent cultural capitals (Prieur and Savage 2013), while others are efforts to understand specific fields, like sexual capital (Martin and George 2006), and the role of the body in carrying capitals, from aesthetic (Anderson et al. 2010), bodily (Wacquant 1995), and physical capital (Shilling 1993). Marx’s old concern with capital accumulation centered on owners and the unequal extraction of value, yet in sociology’s “accumulation of capitals,” there is a relative absence of attention to appropriation and ownership (Neveu 2013). To whom does the value of all of these capitals go?
This article revisits the problem of ownership in the case of women’s “embodied cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984). Building on feminist revisions of capital and its conversions (McCall 1992; Skeggs 2004), I examine the uses of women’s bodily capital and the differential value it generates for men and for women. If, as Randall Collins has posited (1992), women are to status as men are to class, what are the signifiers and types of value that women afford, and why does their value accrue disproportionately to men?
I present ethnographic data on the circulation of women with highly valued bodily capital, called “girls,” in the global circuit of VIP parties catering to the new global elite. A modern social and representational category, “the girl” signifies the contested status of young women who lie outsidechildhood and outside social codes and conventions of adulthood relating to gender, marriage,sexuality, and motherhood(Weinbaum et al. 2008). I show how men and women unequally profit from women’s embodied symbolic value, or girl capitalfor short, which men use to generate status and social connections in an exclusive circuit of businessmen. I document this process by following women throughout the VIP party circuit and its organizers, called party promoters, a class of largely male brokers hired to bring women to VIP destinations. I observe women at parties in New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and the French Riviera over 18 months.
Additionally, this article draws from interviews with 20 girls, 44 promoters, and 20 clients (men who spend money in VIP parties). Drawing from men’s interviews, I map the moral distinctions—especially sexual morality (Parrenas 2011)—that men use to evaluate girls and approach interactions with them in the VIP club. I argue that women are unable to capitalize on their bodily capital through participation in the VIP scene precisely because their use of bodily capital aligns them with devalued social identities.
By shifting the analysis from capital as an individual resource to the cultural meanings that make capital unequally convertible, this article brings systems of ownership and appropriation into the study of culture and class. In addition, this paper “genders” the elite and documents the cultural contradictions of femininity and power in elite men’s social spaces.
THE CAPITAL CONCEPT
Embodied Capital as Personal Advantage
Since Bourdieu analyzed cultural dispositions as convertible resources, types of cultural capitals have multiplied to show how people navigate through various fields, from the neoliberal city (Centner 2008 on spatial capital) to underground parties (Thornton 1995 on subcultural capital).1 By establishing the conversion value and outcomes of people’s various capitals, sociologists have explicated the cultural mechanisms of class reproduction (e.g. DiMaggio 1982; Rivera 2012).
However,theserefinements tend to understand the valueof cultural capital as a personal resource, because such analyses are concerned with how people or groups of people advance through fields to acquire, for example, neighborhood access (Centner 2008) or social esteem (Thornton 1995). This tendency to focus on individual-level rewardscharacterizes the conceptual offspring of Bourdieu’s “embodied cultural capital,” those corporeal cues of class written onto the body (Bourdieu 1984, p. 91). Bourdieu noted that looks are not entirely dependent on class trajectories,[1]and to account for the resource of physical appearance, sociologists have developed an array of concepts: bodily capital (Wacquant 1995), physical capital (Shilling 1993), and aesthetic capital (Anderson et al. 2010).
Together, these works show how embodied capitals are convertible for individual rewards, like earnings, status, and romantic outcomes (for a review see Hammermesh 2011). For example, Green shows how “sexual capital,” the recognition of being desirable in a given field, orders status in nightlife (2011; see also Hamilton 2007). Theconversion ratesof bodily capital are gendered, and a school of British feminist scholarsargues that femininity itself is a form of cultural capital with wide currency not accessible to men, for instance, in some segments of the labor marketlike care work (Huppatz 2009; Lovell 2000; Skeggs1997).
These analyses implicitly frame the primary value of someone’s embodied capital residing with the capital holder herself. An extreme version of this argument is Hakim concept of “erotic capital,” which she argues is women’s collective asset because a biological mandate makes women’s sex appeal more valuable than men’s (2010; for a critique see Green 2013). By keeping the focus on capital as a personal asset with individual consequences, sociologists implicitly shares with neoclassical economists an assumption that self-investment leads to better market outcomes, paradigmatic of human capital theory (Becker 1994).[2] This is explicit in Hakim’s framing of erotic capital, which posits beauty as a currency; she who possesses it gets to “spend” it. Such an approachexemplifies a neoliberal philosophy of the personal imperative for self-investment and a disregard to systemic power relations that unequally distribute erotic capital across populations. Moving beyond the personal advantage perspective, we might ask: who, beyond any particular individual, benefits from the value ofpeople’s embodied capital, and why?
Gender and the Unequal Valueof EmbodiedCapital
Scholars working at the intersection of gender and Bourdieusian theory have begun to chart how gender structures the field of power such that women and men have differentialcapacities to profit from thevalue of their own capital (McCall 1992; Skeggs; Lovell 2000; McNay 2000). As “sign-bearing capital,” Skeggs argues, women are a gender and class resource that men appropriate (2004 p. 22), a kind of “repository” of capital (McNay 2000, p. 142) that can generate social capital and status for men (Chancer 1998; Lovell 2000).
Muchliterature shows howwomen’s bodies signify men’s class distinction, as Sombart noted among the capitalist classes of the 18th century (1967 [1922]) see also Veblen 2009 [1899]). Contemporary ethnographiesdocument such processes of distinctionin interactional service settings like retail, where workers, particularly women, do “recognition work” to construct high status (Hanser 2008, p. 106;Sherman 2007). Women’s bodies add value to organizations, such that employers seek out particular types of women’s bodies because they signify distinction,for instance tall and svelte women are valuable “feminine capital” in luxury services (Otis 2011). Analyses of sex work likewise document the crucial role of female sexual capital in forging men’s business networks through leisure activities (Hoang forthcoming; Osburg 2013). For example, Allison’s ethnography of Japanese hostess clubs shows how women’s sexual capital is exchanged among men to uphold a system of male-controlled capitalism in Japan (1994).
The appropriation of someone else’s embodied capital need not happen via wages. In Greek college life, fraternities gain status from women’s bodily capital, typified by “the blonde” who circulates without pay through frat parties (Hamilton 2007). Similarly, nightclubs amass women’s bodily capital to attract men with money (Grazian 2008; Rivera 2010). Beyond its personal advantages, bodily capital holds value for people and organizations able to harness it, whether by wages or other means.
While these literatures richly document the individual and organizational uses of women’s bodies, they rarely explain the unequal extraction of value from embodied cultural capital. Some feminist scholars have suggested that bodily capital is less valuable to women than women’s bodily is to men for structural and cultural reasons. Gayle Rubin’s “political economy of sex” traced the traffic in women as a system of relations in which women are circulated and exchanged among men, who are the main beneficiaries of women as social commerce (1975, p. 174). Women enable social organization through their exchange in kinships, but men control and benefit from the system (Levi-Strauss 1969). Structurally, women hold fewer positions of power and weaker control of economic capital than men. Culturally, feminine beauty and sex appeal are considered incompatible with professional competence and authority (McCall 1992). Women who succeed in cultivating beauty are cultural aligned with a devalued feminine realm. Additionally, women with high stores of valued bodily capital are subject to greater distrust for strategically using their looks to gain what is seen as unfair and unearned advantage (Haltunen 1982).
Yet polemical feminist claims that women are “valued possessions in themselves, a source of asserting power between men” (Chancer 1998, p. 261), lack explanation, taking men’s uses of women’s bodies as evidence of ownership, such that female bodies are always already a property of men in a sexist society. The question of process remains: How is capital transformed from a personal asset to one controlled by someone else?
Taking the global elite party scene as a case to examine the gendered convertibilityand value of bodily capital, I consider the role of women in the VIP and outline the symbolic meanings of women’s bodily capital below. In the VIP, capital transforms from women’s personal asset to one of greater value for men, i.e., from a property of women to women as property.
THE CASE: THE VIP CIRCUIT
To examine processes of ownership around a form of embodied cultural capital, this article uses the case of women in VIP leisure events for the jet-set elite. The term “jet-set” has origins in the 1950s in reference to global flyers, an era in which commercial flights were prohibitively expensive for most people except the most privileged professionals and tourists. Jet-set is colloquially used to reference highly-mobile persons with class resources; VIP, or “very important people,” is a purchasable status that denotes valued consumers. Sociologists define elites as those with vast class and cultural resources (Khan 2012). Elites belong to the jet-set and the VIP, but not all elites participate in this scene, and many of those who participate are economically insecure. As such, this paper uses the term elite to refer to big spending patrons of clubs—people who have demonstrable economic resources—while the scene is best described as composed of jet-setters and VIPs.
Both VIP parties and elites are global, since the world’s wealthiest stratum is today characterized as more international, more mobile and more geographically diverse than its predecessors (Atkinson and Piketty 2007; Khan 2012). These parties appear in nodes in the global circulation of the business class, which follows a transatlantic calendar of VIP events and parties from St. Barts in January, Miami in March to St. Tropez in July, and parallel to the Fashion Week calendars each September and February (FT 2012).
In such nodes, VIPs frequent exclusive nightclubs, which offer “bottle service.” Rather than order drinks at the bar, VIP patrons rent tables and purchase whole bottles of alcohol, which come with ice and mixers, at prices ranging from $250 per bottle of Absolut vodka (750 ml which retails for $25) to $5,000 for a magnum-size (1.5 liters) bottle of Cristal champagne (which retails for $750). The average price is $1500 per table on a Saturday night at one exclusive nightclub (Elberse, Barlow and Wong 2009). Big spending clients are called “whales” as in finance and gambling lingo, and clubs showcase their expensive purchases by lighting firework sparklers affixed to the bottles and carried by “bottle girls,” attractive women in revealing clothing, to clients’ tables. Entry to these clubs requires the purchase of bottle service, or is free (“comped”), depending on status determinations made by personnel at the door, which are gendered and class-coded (May and Chaplin 2008; Rivera 2010). The door screening ensures that the bottle service club is an exclusively VIP space.
METHODS
Ethnography is the best method to observe the interactional processes of capital conversions, and interviews are ideal forcapturing thedifferential field of meanings aroundthese capital conversions. I gained access to VIP clubs from previous fieldwork in the fashion modeling industry, which has substantial ties to nightclubs and specifically, to party promoters. In my earlier fieldwork, promoters invited me to their parties free of charge with dinner included; to begin this project, I accepted their invitations and began going out with them.
Over the course of 18 months in New York, I attended 17 clubs and went out with promoters on over 100 nights, in addition to taking four trips to VIP destinations. I interviewed a total of 44 promoters (all of them working in New York); of those, seven are transitioning or have already become owners or managers of clubs or restaurants. Interviews were recorded and sometimes lasted over the course of several days as extended conversations. Of the 44 promoters interviewed, I accompanied all but eight of them to their parties at least once and as much as 10 times, and sometimes I visited three or four clubs over the course of one night, which generally began with dinner at 10 p.m. and ended between 3 – 4 a.m., with occasional after-parties stretching beyond 8 a.m. the next day.
Methodologically I followed Kusenbach’s go-along ethnographic method, a hybrid of interviewing and participant observation by following promoters on their daily and nightly rounds to trace the social architecture of elite nightlife (2003). Daytime observations proved as important as nighttime encounters, as one promoter told me: “There can be no night without the day,” albeit the promoter’s day rarely begins before 11 a.m. and often as late as 2 p.m. when he wakes up. Promoters generally welcomed my presence, since their job is chiefly in getting women to hang out. In exchange for promoters’ participation, I dressed the part and went out with them at night; thus through my own bodily capital I was able to maneuver the problem of ethnographic access in studying up (Gusterson 1997).
Reflecting the demographics of promoters, my sample is majority men and includes five women. Half of the 44 promoters interviewed are immigrants (n=22). Most of them speak multiple languages and can converse with international clients and models. Out of the 44 promoters interviewed in New York, just eight of them are white Americans.
I also accepted invitations to VIP destinations on four occasions: five nights in Miami (March), two separate weekends in the Hamptons (June), and one week in Cannes (July), with most expenses paid by promoters, clubs, and VIP clients. Two trips, to Miami and Cannes, were with a promoter named Santos, who I met at a club in New York. After explaining my research, interviewing him, going out with him, and several text conversations later, Santos invited me to attend his parties in Miami over the month of March, during the Electronic Music Festival which draws music industry personnel, and as I discovered, also clients, promoters, and models from around the world. I paid for my own flight to Miami and stayed for free with four young women in the accommodations Santos arranged for all of us together, in the guesthouse of a villa on Star Island, rented by a group of Californian mortgage bankers (who paid $50,000 for the weekend rental). A year later, I met up with Santos in Europe, first in Milan for a night out at a nightclub where he promotes, and next I followed him to Cannes for a week, staying in his rental villa with eight other women.