Erotic Capital Research Articles

Erotic capital and subjective well-being

This article empirically analyzes how an individual’s degree of subjective well-being is affected by erotic capital. Using Hakim's theoretical schema and emic and etic criteria as references, we shall test several hypotheses regarding the importance of erotic capital compared to other types of capital (economic, social, human). Our main argument is that, while people consciously believe social or human capital to be most important for attaining a good life, erotic capital actually wields the most power. The data is based on the 2013 Spain’s General Social Survey. The results show the importance of erotic capital as a generator of subjective well-being and a better predictor of it than other types of capital. When the effects of ugliness or beauty were studied separately, levels of subjective well-being were decreased more by ugliness than they were elevated by beauty.

Understanding Erotic capital for sporting women

우리 사회는 여성의 외모 꾸미기 및 몸매 가꾸기를 끊임없이 요구하고 있다. 이러한 사회적 분위기를 반영하여 다양화된 스포츠 패션, 스포츠 기구 및 도구 등의 여성 스포츠 소비문화의 활성화가 여성의 외모, 몸매를 가꾸는데 필요했다. 결국 스포츠의 활성화는 여성들이 신체적 매력 형성 및 발전을 위해 다양한 노력을 하고 있음을 증명하고 있다. 이 연구에서는 특히 여성 스포츠의 소비문화를 반영하는 여성 스포츠인의 매력자 본(Erotic capital)에 새롭게 주목해 보았다. 이 연구의 목적은 매력자본 이론을 바탕으로, 매력자본의 여섯 가지 핵심 구성 요인인 미모, 성적 매력, 생동감, 사회적 기술, 사회적 표현, 성적 능력을 심도 있게 살펴보고, 어떤 요소가 여성 스포츠인의 매력을 더욱 돋보이게 하는지에 대한 “스포츠 여성의 매력”을 총체적으로 이해하는데 있다. 이 연구는 매력자본 이론을 스포츠 맥락에 적용하고 재해석하기 위해, 탐색적으로 연구문제들을 해결하는 구성주의적 근거이론 방법론을(constructivist grounded theory) 채택하였다. 구체적인 연구방법으로 서면면접법을 통해, 연구 참여자가 매력자본 이론의 각 구성 요소들을 스포츠 영역에 적용해 보고 여성 스포츠만을 위한 새로운 요소를 탐색하였다. 이를 통해, 여성 스포츠인에게 중요한 매력 요소는 무엇이며, 여성 스포츠 발전을 위해 매력자본이 어떻게 활용될 수 있는지에 대한 논의를 진전시켜 보았다.

‘I just think it’s dirty and lazy’: Fat surveillance and erotic capital

Contextualized within the UK mediascape, this article discusses how fat signifies the classed failures of neoliberalism. Because class aspiration, entrepreneurialism and the myth of the competitive individual are pivotal to the political economy of neoliberalism, fat is increasingly and vehemently vilified as abject across media platforms. Fat-surveillance media, which are marketed specifically to women by their visuals, gendered community, language and structures of feeling, participate in a ‘gynaeopticon’ where the controlling gaze is female, and the many women regulate the many women. Rather than being a top-down form of governance and discipline such as in the panopticon, control is affectively devolved among systems or networks of the policing gaze. As well as monitoring women along the lines of class, I argue that these media circumscribe the de-individualizing possibilities and passions of the libido.

“Skankalicious”: Erotic Capital in Women's Flat Track Roller Derby

ABSTRACTErotic capital refers to the use of sexuality for personal gain and has been theorized as a particular source of power (some) women can leverage to advance their interests (Hakim, 2011). With its overt sexuality, women's roller derby provides an ideal opportunity to investigate erotic capital. Locating erotic capital within a specific time, space, and context, I draw upon third-wave feminism and use in-depth conversational interviews and participant observation to reveal ways “derby girls” perform their sexuality and use it to advance their collective and individual interests. This analysis introduces erotic capital to the leisure literature and demonstrates the intentionality of women's resistance to, and reproduction of, gendered stereotypes, particularly with respect to sexuality. In so doing, the findings highlight a need for rethinking traditional conceptualizations of empowerment whereby resistance equals empowering and reproduction equals disempowering, and initiates a new direction for feminist scholarship in this regard.

Sobre el capital erótico como capital cultural

Social theory is trying, increasingly, to reach an agreement on the body place. Particularlly, the Catherine Hakim’s thesis about erotic capital has brought to the foreground the value of the body within contemporary social hierarchies. The Hakim’s questions are connected with another set of conceptualizations that try to understand the value of the physical interaction in our societies. The first aim of this article is to discuss the model proposed by Hakim on the light of the explanatory capacity of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory. As a second goal we wish, enlightened by a set of empirical data, to confirm if it is possible to note down links between body care, social class, age class and gender.

Qué nos enseña el capital cultural para pensar el capital erótico

En el presente artículo recupero ciertos análisis sobre el capital cultural. Con ellos me interrogo acerca de su utilidad para analizar el capital erótico. El trabajo se centra, fundamentalmente, en dos problemas. El primero es la débil institucionalización del capital erótico, diferencia de peso respecto del capital cultural. La segunda en cómo podemos analizar las desigualdades corporales atendiendo a ciertos problemas de la investigación sociológica y filosófica sobre el capital cultural. Como conclusión se justifica que el capital erótico puede considerarse un tipo de capital cultural y se definen las condiciones por las que los sujetos pueden enfrentarse a formas de dominación vinculadas al capital erótico.

'Belle comme le jour': beauty, power and the king's mistress

While in his Mémoires pour l’instruction du dauphin Louis XIV insisted that he never allowed his pleasures or his mistresses to influence his political decisions, the details of his reign indicate that this was not the case. Few women exercised more influence in Louis’ court than his mistresses, in particular Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, marquise de Montespan. Montespan’s magnificence was united with the noted esprit Mortemart as well the confidence that came from membership in one of France’s most illustrious families, which allowed Montespan to carve out a key political position at court during the ‘golden years’ of Louis’ reign. This article demonstrates that female beauty and erotic capital were important resources for women in an ‘absolutist’ polity, central to the workings of politics and key to understanding the nature of power in early modern society.

Attitudes Towards Performing and Developing Erotic Capital in Consumer Culture

Attitudes Towards Performing and Developing Erotic Capital in Consumer Culture

The Evangelical Sexual Marketplace: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Exchange and Conversion of Erotic Capital in an Evangelical Church

Since the development of the early church, sexual ethics and the regulation of heterosexual relationships have been integral parts of Christian religious practice. Evangelical Christian communities are no exception to this pattern of regulation. In particular, this article makes three key arguments regarding Evangelical sexual practices. First, heterosexual relationships and marriage have become one of the most important (if not the most important) aspects of Evangelical religious and social practice, surmounting both Baptism and the Eucharist. Second, those in the Evangelical sub-culture tend to find several qualities more or less attractive in a potential mate, some of which differ from those outside the sub-culture. Finally, within many Evangelical churches a defined social space—a sexual marketplace—exists where individual agents exchange and convert this commodity, among others, to attract potential marital partners. The author derives these conclusions from the ethnographic observations and interviews he conducted while attending an urban Canadian Pentecostal Church in 2009 and 2010.

Catherine Hakim: Erotic Capital: the Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom

The erotic as a subject has frequently been discussed in the social sciences. Georg Simmel, while searching for an ‘individual law of the erotic’, described the development of erotic situations as the specific tension between promise and denial. Talcott Parsons examined the relevance of eroticism for the socialization process, and Anthony Giddens discussed the erotic in terms of a physically symbolized cultivation of emotions. Pierre Bourdieu described charm and charisma as methods of defining legitimate physicality, and their effects on, for example, one’s success on the labour market. Many other sociologists, such as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Niklas Luhmann, and Roland Barthes, have examined the erotic in regard to its various manifestations and its changing impact on the social. Yet it is also true that the erotic, perhaps due to implicit biological connotations, is usually not a central object of sociological inquiry. This may seem surprising, considering the fact that our own everyday experiences suggest that eroticism plays a significant role in social relationships. In her book Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom, Catherine Hakim reminds sociologists of this often neglected phenomenon, while also presenting a comprehensive insight into the sphere of erotic and physical attraction.

Erotic capital: the power of attraction in the boardroom and the bedroom

In 2010, pioneering sociologist Catherine Hakim shocked the world with a provocative new theory: In addition to the three recognized personal assets (economic, cultural, and social capital), each individual has a fourth asset--erotic capital--that he or she can, and should, use to advance within society. In this bold and controversial book, Hakim explores the applications and significance of erotic capital, challenging the disapproval meted out to women and men who use sex appeal to get ahead in life. Social scientists have paid little serious attention to these modes of personal empowerment, despite overwhelming evidence of their importance. In Erotic Capital, Hakim marshals a trove of research to show that rather than degrading those who employ it, erotic capital represents a powerful and potentially equalizing tool--one that we scorn only to our own detriment.

Book Review: Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry

Book Review: Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry

Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry

Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry

Theorizing Pleasure: New Directions in Black Feminist Studies

TheorizingPleasure: New Directionsin Black FeministStudies Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Article Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture. By Shayne Lee. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2010. Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class. By Lisa B. Thompson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry. By Siobhan Brooks. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Mutha Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture. By L. H. Stallings. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Black women's sexuality has routinely been described "as an absence.'" Hortense Spiller's oft-quoted lines analogizing black women to "the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb" poignantly capture this absence, registering the paucity of cultural space for black women to claim sexual agency and articulate complex sexual personhood.2 More than that, black femi nist scholars have long documented a "culture of dissemblance," where black women "creatfe] the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves ... while actually remaining an enigma,"3 and argued that black women have adopted a "politics of silence" and a "politics of respectability" to shield the black female body from cultural scrutiny.4 FeministStudies38, no. 2 (Summer 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 507 508 Jennifer C. Nash Of course, for as long as black women have adopted strategic silences to protect their bodies from scrutiny, there have been black women—both activists and scholars—attempting to break that silence, countering the dominant intellectual tradition by insisting on black women's complex pleasures and longings. Audre Lorde's now canonical celebration of the erotic, Alice Walker's description of the womanist's love for "other women, sexually and/or nonsexually," and Tricia Rose's Longingto Tell, a collection of black women's sexual histo ries, all epitomize critical ruptures in the silence surrounding black female sexuality The texts that are the subject of this review are all part of this rupture, insisting on describing black women's complex sexualities and pleasures; as L. H. Stallings notes, these texts are not "longing to tell," they aretelling.5 Shayne Lee's EroticRevolutionaries ends with a revealing confession. He writes, "I like my feminism complex, perplexingly diverse, and open to contradiction" (123). It is a moment that echoes Joan Morgan, Rebecca Walker, Lisa Jones, and many other contemporary feminists who champion "a feminism brave enough to fuck with the grays."6 Lee's confession explicitly positions his book as a black Third Wave7 feminist text, one invested in crafting a black feminism open to the paradox and multiplicity that are "hallmarks of sexuality."8 Erotic Revolutionaries ambitiously weaves together Third Wave femi nism, pro-sex feminism, and scripting theory to celebrate erotically transformative black female figures in contemporary popular culture. The sub-jects at the heart of Lee's book—including urban erotica writer Zane, singer Beyonce Knowles, tennis player Serena Williams, and television host Tyra Banks—are all black popular cultural producers who "defile traditional prescriptions for female prudence and inaugu rate sexual scripts that carve new spaces for eroticism and sexual free dom" (128). They are, according to Lee, erotic revolutionaries who have cast aside demands for black female respectability and instead cele brate their sexual agency. Lee's analysis of these erotic revolutionaries depends on scripting theory, which he draws from John Gagnon and William Simon's Sexual Conduct:The SocialSources ofHumanSexuality. Scripting theory allows Lee to argue both that erotic revolutionaries can craft new sexual scripts for themselves and that their cultural presence might allow for the production of new sexual scripts, ones that high light that black women are "sexual subjects, actors, and agents" (7). Jennifer C. Nash 509 Although Lee tends to celebrate erotic revolutionaries for their production of new, more liberating, sexual scripts, his reading of Beyonce suggests that erotic revolutionaries can deploy scripts that are more complex than simple declarations of agency. He argues that Beyonce's oeuvre reveals that sexuality is paradoxical terrain; it is both a locus of "comfort, excitement, and exuberance" (21) and a potentially "destructive power with the capacity to...

Unequal desires: race and erotic capital in the stripping industry

Unequal desires: race and erotic capital in the stripping industry

Corporeal Entrepreneurialism and Neoliberal Agency in the Sex Trade at the US-Mexican Border

In this essay I will discuss corporeal entrepreneurialism in the context of commercial sex and neoliberal agency at the United States-Mexico border. I want to situate the sex trade in a larger neoliberal context of economic need, mobility and commercialization. The essay addresses how bodily entrepreneurialism can function as a gateway to upward social mobility and how erotic capital can level existing social and economic inequalities and thus act as a catalyst to exit marginalized communities. I am drawing on Wacquants (1995) work on corporeal entrepreneurs and also on the notion of bodily capital that he has developed therein. Using bodily capital in the context of sex work, it makes sense to talk more specifically about erotic capital, which is the primary currency in the sex trade. Thus, I will integrate Isaiah Greens (2008) definition of erotic capital and elaborate how women make use of their bodies to enhance their erotic capital and explain what their strategies and perceptions are. Inspired by Alexander Edmonds' (2007) work on beauty and race in Brazil, I will elaborate how corporeal entrepreneurs strategically use their bodily and erotic capital to counteract their socioeconomic marginalization and challenge traditional hierarchies. As will become clear, corporeal entrepreneurialism ties together women's agency, market demand, and monetary value, and, to succeed, this endeavor requires enormous levels of discipline, emotional resilience, management skills, stamina, and purposefulness. Theory Theoretically, this essay is framed within the literature that has addressed entrepreneurial selves in late capitalism (Tyler 2004; Rose 1999; Salecl 2004; Buhrmann 2005; Freeman 2007). Demystifying sex work requires an understanding of sex workers as aspiring corporeal entrepreneurs who make use of their bodily and erotic capital, responding to neoliberal structural demands while creating opportunities for themselves. Looking at sex work at the US-Mexican border, we find the complicated entanglement of submission to the entrepreneurial imperative of the neoliberal present combined with the individuals positive advancement and the improvement of her socioeconomic position. Andrea Buhrmann ascribes the appearance of an to the last third of the twentieth century. She affirms that the enterprising self is defined by the steering of action, feeling, thinking and willing on the basis of an orientation on the criteria of economic efficiency and entrepreneurial calculation (2005, 2). Analogically, Ulrich Brockling (2007) points out that the principle Act entrepreneurial! has become the categorical imperative of the present, and Melissa Tyler speaks of the managerial colonization of everyday (2004, 82). Managerial ways of thinking about our selves and our bodies have become dominant in late capitalism. Individuals are incited to become engaged in an ongoing process of self-optimization, constantly aspiring to change themselves, and finding more effective ways of managing their own resources. Individuals are incited to be entrepreneurial, yet in a self-responsible way, conscious of possible risks, and autonomously engaged in techniques of self-care. The enterprising self is expected to be aspiring, purposeful, and willing to be competitive. An entrepreneurial imperative, exceeding beyond the economic sphere, interlaces all levels of life whereby marketability becomes a primary focus of the individuals organization of everyday life. Simultaneously, every individual is considered an autonomous agent who is capable of creating a successful project of the self. Nikolas Rose (1999) has highlighted that individuals in late capitalism are encouraged to become entrepreneurs who shape their lives through the choices they make from among the options available to them. Historically, the enterprising self has been a male subjectwho was incited to take risks and exploit his bodily resources in order to become a self-made man. …

Erotic Capital

We present a new theory of erotic capital as a fourth personal asset, an important addition to economic, cultural, and social capital. Erotic capital has six, or possibly seven, distinct elements, one of which has been characterized as ‘emotional labour’. Erotic capital is increasingly important in the sexualized culture of affluent modern societies. Erotic capital is not only a major asset in mating and marriage markets, but can also be important in labour markets, the media, politics, advertising, sports, the arts, and in everyday social interaction. Women generally have more erotic capital than men because they work harder at it. Given the large imbalance between men and women in sexual interest over the life course, women are well placed to exploit their erotic capital. A central feature of patriarchy has been the construction of ‘moral’ ideologies that inhibit women from exploiting their erotic capital to achieve economic and social benefits. Feminist theory has been unable to extricate itself from this patriarchal perspective and reinforces ‘moral’ prohibitions on women's sexual, social, and economic activities and women’s exploitation of their erotic capital.