Girls in the Consolidation of Class among Elites: Ownership and Cultural Capital

• In Event: 111 - Regular Session. Class Cultures

Abstract

The capital concept has proliferated in studies of culture and stratification, usually depicting individual assets and personal advantages within given fields. Because this approach sidesteps issues of ownership, it obscures relational processes that allow for the appropriation of capital by some actors and not others. Based on fieldwork in the VIP party circuit from New York to Cannes, as well as 77 interviews with party organizers and guests, I document the appropriation of women’s bodily capital by men, who use women as a symbolic resource I term girl capital to generate money, status, and social ties. Party promoters, mostly male brokers, secure girl capital through four stages: recruitment, mobilization, control, and discipline. Relational work between promoters and women, cemented by gifts and strategic intimacies, frames women’s labor as leisure and friendship, while boundary work legitimizes the circulation of women as distinct from sexual labor. This system of traffic in women enables class consolidation among men in the global elite, while reproducing gender inequality at the top of the social class hierarchy. This article shifts the analysis of capital away from individual assets and onto the social relations that make capitals convertible, bringing ownership into the study of culture and class.

Author

• Ashley E. Mears, Boston University