Review of “What Is Sexual Capital?”

Abstract

More and more, “capital” is deployed for conceptualizing and theorizing around the many aspects of the self that can be leveraged for profit. In What Is Sexual Capital? Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz take on the titular form of capital to examine how sexuality, as it has historically progressed from traditional religious morals through a more secular modernity and entered the neoliberal era, has become inextricable from capitalist social structures. Although sexual capital is a relatively new term, it is not specific to our current era. Kaplan and Illouz demonstrate the historical connection between sexuality and its monetary consequences by examining how traditional Christian values tethered women’s chastity to their subordinate economic position. They discuss how the institutionalization of Victorian sexual mores restricted women’s sexual freedom and coupled with their inability to accumulate their own wealth, such that desirability and its corresponding access to wealth vis-á-vis men depended on women’s ability to position themselves in the Victorian sexual field as chaste. Here, sexual capital relied on women’s lack of sexual experience.