Value, Bodily Capital, and Gender Inequality after Death

Abstract

This article examines dead celebrities’ posthumous careers and considers how gendered inequalities around possession, value, and bodily capital are produced and consumed even after death. The concept of capital plays a significant role in studies of culture, usually in relation to individual possession and personal, social, and material advantage. ‘Bodily capital’ sheds particular light upon the different ways bodies can possess value and how the generation of value is unequally distributed for men and women. Through an analysis of the Forbes Magazine Top Dead Earning Celebrities List (2001–2018), the inequality of value between men and women generated from bodily capital is examined. This article extends the intellectual agenda of sociological research on gendered inequality in bodily capital through dead celebrity posthumous careers. It reveals how, why, and when value is generated unequally with celebrity women’s bodily capital becoming a symbolic resource for others to generate profit. Furthermore, it speculates upon the prospect of a revolution in the ownership and value of gendered bodily capital among dead celebrities and predicts a future shift for women’s bodily capital and value after death.

Going Public: Performing Dying in the Second Decade of the 21st Century

“…Those already in the public domain before their public dying, and with the resources to secure their cultural afterlives, are less likely to fade from public memory than those who came to wider public attention (but were not famous before) through their public dying. In attempting to secure their posthumous futures, those in positions of power/privilege able to publicly choreograph their dying may also be contributing to the perpetuation in death of inequalities that exist in life (Penfold-Mounce, 2020b).…”

“…‘Going public’ with one’s illness/dying (especially by those already in the public domain) may help resist such victim status by normalising illness/dying as an everyday part of life. It may also provide an antidote to social fading by enabling continuing bonds (Klass et al, 1996) between the famous and their publics, delaying/preventing a ‘second death’, while allowing for their lives (and deaths) to live on as part of the cultural afterlives of death (Englund, 2022; Penfold-Mounce, 2018, 2020b). 2 The extent to which one’s posthumous identity is secured is not, however, universal but clearly indexed to one’s access to various forms of capital (symbolic or otherwise) that reflect inequalities of gender and class in ways related to the body (Penfold-Mounce, 2020b).…”