The gendered habitus: on the surprising gendered homologies in taste structures.

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 3: Cultural Capital and Taste

Abstract

Popular and scholarly intuitions alike tell us that men and women's tastes have manifestly different tastes when it comes to culture. Yet, the empirical results don't always agree: generations of scholarships have found a surprising homogeneity when it comes to the aggregate cultural tastes. Why? In this paper, we argue that such homogeneity is ultimately a facile artifact of an excessively flat operationalization of taste. Building on Bourdieusian work on the unity and multidimensionality of taste, we show that beneath these surface-level similarities between men and women are deep, surprising, and durable between-gender differences in aggregate tastes. Drawing on data from a nationally representative survey of US residents in 2024 and Poisson models of aggregate tastes, we show relying on affective preference as a unidimensional approximation of taste conceals gendered homologies in taste structures. Replicating previous work, we find that men and women share comparable rates of aggregated preferences and aversions to music genres. However, gender homologies become obvious once we begin considering asymmetries and antinomies among the many modalities of taste. These gender homologies are surprising, and do not comport neatly with previous theories on the gendered habitus. Finally, we show that these gendered difference in tastes are durable, and not ameliorated by individuals' accumulation of cultural capital.

Author

• Xiangyu Ma, Nanyang Technological University