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 global VIP party circuit from New York to Cannes, and 84 interviews with party organizers and patrons, I document the appropriation of women’s bodily capital, or “girl capital," by men who appropriate women as a symbolic resource to generate profit, status, and social ties in an exclusive world of businessmen. Male brokers secure girl capital through four stages: recruitment, mobilization, control, and discipline. 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-individual advantages, this article brings appropriation into the study of culture and class.
Ashley Mears is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her research, at the intersection of cultural and economic sociology and gender studies, studies processes of valuation and evaluation primarily in market settings, with a focus on the cultural foundations of economic inequalities. She is the author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model (University of California Press, 2011). She received her PhD in Sociology from New York University