Erotic Capital

Abstract

Erotic capital is a new concept in social science, a label for the personal asset of physical and social attractiveness that has increasing importance in the twenty‐first century, and that offers substantial social benefits and economic value to those who choose to develop and exploit it.

Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty

“…Embodied cultural capital at work Another conceptual scaffold underlying aesthetic labor is Bourdieu's "embodied cultural capital," those corporeal cues of class written onto the body (Bourdieu 1984, 91). Sociologists have an array of concepts to account for the body as a resource, such as aesthetic capital (Anderson et al 2010), erotic (Hakim 2010) and sexual capital (Green 2011), and bodily capital (Bernstein 2007;Wacquant 1995). Across these concepts, the body is a kind of capital as one moves through social space.…”

“…This has the benefit of both foregrounding context to make sense of the value of looks, and it accounts for the unequal distribution of power in defining which looksand whosecount. Under this perspective, the value of women's erotic capital is not a matter of mere individual effort to look goodapplying makeup and working out, as Hakim (2010) advisesbecause bodies only make sense in their respective social fields, where whiteness, heterosexuality, youth and upper-class privileges play out. Since the value of women's beauty is steeped in class inequalities, as well as colonial discourses that privilege whiteness, and it is premised on youth, beauty is not an equally available asset for all women.…”

“…For these reasons, presentations of femininity may be a salient "investment strategy" for women (Lovell, 2000, 22); recall Hakim's point that beauty is a personal and collective advantage for women to get ahead in work and romance (Hakim 2010). However, Green notes that women's beauty premiums are actually less those of men's in the labor market, according to economists' research (Hamermesh 2011;Green 2013).…”

“…In the growing research agenda on the social consequences of looks, "pulchronomics," the economics of beauty, has now quantified the lifetime wage premiums of being perceived as good looking (Hamermesh 2011). A person's looks and their market valuebe it in the market for labor or romantic partnersappear linked, leading some to herald beauty as an investment strategy for better returns (Hakim 2010). Yet the economistic approach to beauty as a self-interested maximization strategy puts the contents of aesthetics into a "black box" and assumes a priori preferences for which looks are deemed good.…”

The Resources of Ageing? Middle-Aged Gay Men's Accounts of Manchester's Gay Voluntary Organizations

“…

Middle-aged men's experiences of gay voluntary organizations (GVOs) are neglected in research. To address this knowledge gap, this article extends Bourdieusian theorizing beyond that deployed by Hakim (2010) and Green (2008) concerning 'erotic capital' to demonstrate how norms in GVOs can facilitate or frustrate mobilization of 'ageing capital' by middle-aged gay men living in Manchester (UK), which has implications for comparable cities within and beyond a UK context. Based on interviews with 22 men aged 39-55, this article demonstrates how 'ageing capital' can facilitate challenge to gay ageism but also how such ageism can frustrate and even overwhelm men's capacities to deploy ageing capital in generic GVOs, thus reinforcing intergenerational conflict and expression of ageism towards younger gay men.

…”