The Paradox of Ease: Producing Embodied Cultural Capital and Reproducing Meritocracy

• In Event: 380 - Section on Body and Embodiment Paper Session. Consumption and Embodiment: Intersections and Identities (co-sponsored with Section on Consumers and Consumption)

Abstract

This paper addresses a puzzle of contemporary American cultural capital: that despite rising class inequality, elites are claiming to have earned their status on an “open” playing field. But if elites are less exclusionary, how are they invisibly reproducing their privilege while framing their status as earned? As argued by Bourdieu and recently suggested by Khan, “hard work” may be accompanied by naturalized and embodied performances of ease, but how do elites achieve this paradox? To answer this, I study a form of cultural capital that is characterized by both stratification and discourses of merit: thin, fit bodies. Using ethnographic data from a white, upper-middle class “Fun Run” in Boulder, Colorado, I find that runners who successfully achieve the paradoxical performance of the “ease of hard work” engage in two contrasting forms of boundary work: against lazier people and against those who try too hard or for “inauthentic” reasons. I propose that an upper-middle class habitus enables some people to appear to naturally have what it takes, thus legitimizing inequality while disguising structural barriers. My findings suggest that subtle and embodied forms of exclusion and boundary work continue to play a role in American practices of distinction.

Author

• Jessie Luna, University of Colorado-Boulder