Gender,Field, and Habitus: How Gendered Dispositions Reproduce Fields of Cultural Production

Bourdieu argues that fields of action produce a specific habitus in participants, and views this specific habitus as a mechanism through which the field is reproduced. Although Bourdieu acknowledges the habitus as gendered, he does not theorize gender as part of the mutually constitutive relationship between field and habitus. Using evidence from two cultural fields, the Toronto heavy metal and folk music scenes, I show that gender is central to the process through which field and habitus sustain each other. The metal field produces a “metalhead habitus” that privileges gender performances centered on individual dominance and status competition. In contrast, the “folkie habitus” encourages gender performances centered on caring, emotional relations with others, and community‐building. These differently gendered habitus support different working conventions: music production occurs largely through volunteer‐based nonprofit organizations in the folk field, and individual entrepreneurship in the metal field. The gendered habitus also supports different stylistic conventions: guitar virtuosity in the metal field, and participatory music‐making in folk. Applying a gendered lens to the field–habitus relationship clarifies the mechanisms through which cultural fields shape individual action, and the mechanisms through which cultural fields are reproduced and maintained.     

How does cultural capital affect educational performance: Signals or skills?

In this paper, we test two mechanisms through which cultural capital might affect educational performance: (a) teachers misinterpreting cultural capital as signals of academic brilliance and (b) cultural capital fostering skills in children that enhance educational performance. We analyse data from the ECLS-K and ECLS-K:2011 from the United States and focus on three aspects of children’s cultural capital: participation in performing arts, reading interest and participation in athletics and clubs. We find that (1) none of the three aspects of cultural capital that we consider affects teachers’ evaluations of children’s academic skills; (2) reading interest has a direct positive effect on educational performance; and (3) the direct effect of reading interest on educational performance does not depend on schooling context. Our results provide little support for the hypothesis that cultural capital operates via signals about academic brilliance. Instead, they suggest that cultural capital fosters skills in children that enhance educational performance. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings.     

Heavy Genealogy: Mapping the Currents,Contraflows and Conflicts of the Emergent Field of Metal Studies, 1978-2010

What is metal studies? How can we define and characterize it? How has it emerged as a body of academic enquiry? What are its dominant disciplinary strands, theoretical concepts and preferred methodologies? Which studies have claimed most attention, defined the goals of scholarship, typical research strategies and values? How has the claim for the legitimacy or symbolic value of metal scholarship been achieved (if it has): over time and through gradual acceptance or through conflict and contestation? How can this process of formation, or strategy of legitimation, be mapped, examined and interrogated and which methods of historical, institutional and cultural analysis are best suited to this task? Working with the most complete bibliography to date of published research on heavy metal, music and culture (the MSBD), this article employs Foucault’s archaeological “method” to examine the institutional, cultural and political contexts and conflicts that inform the genealogy of this scholarship. Such analysis reveals a formative, largely negative account of heavy metal to be found in the “sociology of rock”; a large volume of psychology work, examining heavy metal music preference as an indicator of youth risk, deviance and delinquency; sociological work on youth and deviancy critical of the values of this research and its links to social policy and politics; culminating in the work of Weinstein and Walser, who advocate a perspective sympathetic to the values of heavy metal fans themselves. Following Bourdieu, I interpret such symbolic strategies as claims for expertise within the academic field that are high or low in symbolic capital to the extent they can attain disciplinary autonomy. I then go on to examine the most recent strands of research, within cultural studies and ethnomusicology, concerned with the global metal music diaspora, and consider to what extent such work is constitutive of a coherent subfield of metal studies that can be distinguished from earlier work and what the implications of this might be.     

Negotiating and Practicing Performance: An Ethnographic Study of a Musical Open Mic in Brooklyn,New York

This qualitative study explores amateur musicians and their performance negotiations at a weekly “open mic” in Brooklyn, New York. These musicians and their performance negotiations are juxtaposed against the larger cultural structures of musical scenes and musical art worlds. Opportunities and pathways are few for amateur musicians to practice and negotiate the craft of performance. This study examines the negotiation of the presumed boundaries between musical practice and performance within an open mic scene constructed by and for amateur musicians who are marginal to the larger musical art world.     

Contesting racism: how do the black middle-class use cultural consumption for anti-racism?

ABSTRACT

Drawing on interviews with thirty-two black British professionals, and ethnographic work in middle-class cultural spaces across London, this paper asks ‘How do the black middle-class use cultural consumption for anti-racism?’ I argue that the black middle-class contest the racial hierarchy at three levels through their cultural consumption: the material, the ideological, and the symbolic. At the material level, black middle-class people consume cultural forms they decode as ‘white’ in order to establish an equity with whites in levels of cultural capital. At the ideological level, black middle-class people consume cultural forms that uplift meanings and representations of blackness, thus challenging controlling images of blackness. Lastly, at the symbolic level, black middle-class folks create and sustain cultural spaces where black people’s cultural and symbolic knowledge is given proper recognition and authority.     

Micro-entrepreneurship,new media technologies,and the reproduction and reconfiguration of gender in rural China

This article explores the connections between micro-entrepreneurship, new media technologies, and gender in rural China. Based on fieldwork among diverse individuals engaged in agricultural and non-agricultural micro-entrepreneurship, I examine how uses of technology in economic production become the site for the reproduction and/or reconfiguration of gender hierarchies. Grounding my analysis in feminist and critical theories of technology, I investigate the gendered uses and discourses of new media technologies that emerge from three types of entrepreneurial spaces: physical places where micro-entrepreneurship is based on new media technologies, such as internet cafés and mobile phone shops; virtual realms where new media technologies potentially facilitate entrepreneurship, including text messaging and various websites; and virtual spaces where informal learning and sharing take place via mediated networks formed around common occupations. I argue that in the context of entrepreneurship, even among women and men who are young and have migration experience, deeply entrenched gendered power differentials produce unequal access to capital and social networks, and hence uses and understandings of technology. Although engagement with technology has opened up new spaces for economic enhancement and the rearrangement of conventional gender norms, such engagement does not overcome – indeed, in many cases reproduces – gendered power relations.     

Family capital: Examining social capital,family commitment,and acculturation among college-enrolled Mexican-American men and women in the Southwestern United States

Social capital is integral to an individual’s ability to access various resources embedded in social and familial networks that are important in academic access and future success. The types and dynamics of social relationships created by men and women are thought to generate different forms of social capital with factors such as acculturation resulting in differences in intercultural networks and potential resource access. However, the factors that contribute to the development of social capital require further investigation. The current study examines the relationship between acculturation, family role commitment, and various social network characteristics associated with social capital among Mexican-American college-enrolled men (n = 119) and women (n = 196). Several multiple regressions were conducted. Findings indicate that acculturation and family role commitment relate differently to social-capital-network characteristics among Mexican-American men and women. For women, marital commitment was consistently related to social-capital-network characteristics whereas acculturation factors seemed to be more salient among men. Overall, study variables accounted for a larger portion of the variance for social-capital-network characteristics across analyses for men than women indicating that other factors may be at play in generating social capital for women.     

Ageing and exercise: building body capital in old age

Background

Research that provides better understanding of the motivational processes in older age to maintain a healthy and active lifestyle is sought after. We apply theoretical approaches to cultural capital, active and healthy aging health to shed light on the women’s experiences in maintaining physical capabilities through an active lifestyle, and thereby facilitating their own inclusion in society. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore why older home dwelling women over the age of 70 years or more spend time in physical exercise and their experiences about the importance of participating in group exercise for their daily life.This paper reports on a qualitative study based on interviews with 16 older women aged 70 years or more and regularly attending group exercise classes in the community at an established workout center. The data were analyzed the data using an inductive content analysis approach.

Results

Three overreaching and interrelated themes emerged from the interviews: “Building body capital for independence”, “Building body capital to maintain vitality and being in control” and “Building resources for social interaction”. The findings suggest that group exercise is important for building body capital. The group exercise helped the women in building bodily ability to manage everyday life, maintain vitality, being in control, pursue social interaction and live independently. These body resources were important for these older women’s experience of the manageability and meaningfulness of daily life.

Conclusion

This study has provided insights into older women’s understanding and experiences of the challenges of everyday life within a theoretical framework of cultural capital and health. The women acquired cultural health capital, and more specifically body capital, by participating in the group exercise classes. The women’s investment in body capital through regular physical activity created resources which facilitated social participation. Therefore professionals need to be aware of this when performing group exercise.

     

Aesthetic Identity,Race, and American Folk Music

This article uses the concept of aesthetic identity to interrogate the relationship among musical genres, social movements and racial identity. American folk music has at some times subverted and other times reinforced the categorical boundaries between blacks and whites in twentieth-century United States. Aesthetic identity is the cultural alignment of artistic genres to social groups by which groups come to feel that genres represent our or their art, music, and literature. Genre boundaries then become social boundaries. Folk music inverts the usual relationship of genre and social boundaries. Folk music is always the culture of some other, either racial, regional, class, or national. Before it was called folk music, American vernacular music was much more racially integrated than the society around it, creolized across a spectrum from predominantly European to predominantly African- influenced, but with most exhibiting both. Before the era of commercial recording, black and white musicians sang the same music, learned techniques and songs from each other, and shared a social world of performance. The concept of folk music was created by academic elites, but remained unfamiliar to most people until the organized left took it on as a cultural project in the late 1930s and 1940s. Both academic elites and political activists constructed the genre as an alternative to the racialized genres that the commercial recording industry had dubbed race records and hillbilly music. American communists and their allies were especially self-conscious about using folk music as an instrument of racial solidarity in a particularly racially polarized era. Submerged by McCarthyism until the 1960s, folk music was revived as a racially unified genre, but quickly became whitened. My explanation for why the folk revival was so white revolves around three factors: the continuing legacy of commercial racial categories, the failure of the New Left to control music through a cultural infrastructure as effectively as had the old left, and the cultural momentum of an understanding of folk music as the music of the other at a time when blacks were trying to enter a system that white middle-class youth were rejecting.     

What is good taste good for?

Bourdieu afflrme que le capital cultural est utile lorsque Ton veut obtenir une situation de classe supérieure, particuliérement dans certains secteurs, et n'est en fait qu'une seule chose: une culture de condition supérieure. Mais son argument, établit pour une France centralisée, est moins valable pour le Canada plus subdivisé. Cet article étudie les idées de Bourdieu sous tous leurs aspects pour un échantillon quota de Torontoniens. Les résultats suggèrent qu'un capital culturel de condition supérieure existe à Toronto, mais qu'il a peu d'effet sur les relations de classe au travail, ou le véritable capital culturel dirige la culture d'entreprise qui domine les entreprises privées. La culture d'entreprise est aussi repartie en classes et pourrait jouer un role dans la reproduction de classes qui est tres similaire a ce que Bourdieu revendique comme culture de condition supérieure.
Bourdieu argues that cultural capital is useful in gaining higher class location, especially in some sectors, and is essentially a single thing: high status culture. But his argument, developed for centralized France, is less suitable for more subdivided Canada. This paper explores Bourdieu's ideas through a quota sample of 40 Torontonians. Results suggest that high status cultural capital does exist in Toronto, but has little part in class relationships at work, where the true cultural capital is command of the business culture which dominates private enterprises. Business culture is also class stratified, and may play a role in class reproduction which is quite similar to that which Bourdieu asserts for high status culture.     

A ‘Minority’ on the Move: Boundary Work among Filipina Muslim Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

This article analyses the migration of a religious ‘minority’ that is largely invisible within migration studies, namely Muslim Filipina domestic workers. More specifically, this research shows that the category of ‘minority’ is not fixed and is always negotiated through transnational spaces and boundary work. In doing so, the article highlights how religious belonging, the status of minority and migration intersect and are negotiated during the period prior to these women leaving their country, during their time in the country of destination, and when they return to the Philippines. How boundary work affects the religious belonging of this Muslim ‘minority’ is underlined by presenting the Middle East as an opportunity to perform norms of ‘Muslimness’. The performance of these norms as an opportunity for these women to challenge the status of being a ‘minority’ in the Philippines is also examined. Finally, this article shows how these Muslim ‘minorities’ gain access to a certain symbolic capital by becoming hajji and balikbayan (returnees) when they return home.     

Political education in post-Second World War Germany and the American South

Abstract

Both American and European adult educationalists saw the Danish folk high school as a model for how to educate citizens for more active involvement in their communities. This article examines the experience of Wislade Folk School in Germany and the Highlander Folk School in the United States after the Second World War. In the German case, Wislade was unable to persuade local people to confront the evils of Nazism, but did facilitate the practical tackling of pressing social and economic problems. Highlander struggled to retain support from white Southerners as the School increasingly addressed the evils of segregation, but developed one of its most effective programmes in conjunction with African Americans as part of the emerging civil rights movement. The study concludes that political education is most effective when it addresses people's aspirations, and builds upon existing social capital.     

Heavy metal in Turkey: Tracking the tensions of democratization in the 1990s

Music, as a form of public discourse, invariably becomes a social science field that is considered more in the postmodern era when the boundaries are blurred. This study examines the political and cultural links between the emergence of the heavy metal genre and Turkish democracy. There are correlations between the prevalence of heavy metal in Turkey and the country's social and political transition in the 1990s and the search for a new path. The main argument here is that, among the country's tense democratization efforts and social problems, the heavy metal genre also indirectly carries the distinct traces of a different political search for the youth of the 1990s, although not directly. Democratic politics is a process established by daily life with the direct influence of societal interactions, and Turkish politics, and cultural life, in this case, heavy metal, include important notions in this remarkable manner. The main point symbolized by metal music in Turkey was its lyrical and artistic ability to express different points of view loudly enough against the uniform religious and nationalist culture that could be offensive, while other mainstream ranges such as pop and arabesque music didn't mind this issue.     

Laddishness Online

In a textual analysis of public social network site (SNS) profiles owned by young women aged between 18 and 21, many of the profiles contain representations of self which would typically be considered ‘unfeminine’. Photos of young women and their friends posed with wide open mouths and protruding tongues and images depicting drunkenness and raucousness are common. This kind of ‘laddish’ performativity by young women leaves feminists, especially those concerned with cultural representation, with a dilemma: is ‘feminist representation’ to be found in this aspect of SNS representation, in this kind of ‘symbolically inverted’ depiction of feminine bodies? Does this kind of ‘laddish’ performativity by young women function less as a rebellion against femininity and more as a kind of ‘giving in’ to a certain model of masculinity; as a ‘phallic’ form of girlhood now licensed by the patriarchy; or even an indication of ‘feminine melancholia’, predicated on the broader cultural rejection of critical feminist voices? In this article, I suggest that neither paradigms of resistance or conformity completely suffice for understanding ‘laddishness’ by young women in the context of a viewing premise of self-production, such as that we encounter with SNS material. I start by offering a possible feminist reading of ‘laddish’ body performativity by young women on SNSs, drawing from theories of the ‘grotesque body’ in representation as well as from Mulvey's psychological explanation of ‘voyeuristic’ viewing pleasure in narrative cinema. I go on to develop the concept of ‘performative shamelessness’ by young women and expand upon its possible significations in the post-feminist, neoliberal cultural landscape. Engaging in particular with McRobbie's ideas about the post-feminist era, I suggest that performative shamelessness may be one of the few options available to young women wishing to maintain a sense of self-definition in the face of intense social and cultural scrutinizing, and often sexually objectifying, gazes.     

A TALE OF TWO VISIONS: Representing the Orientialized West,Representing the Orient

Starting in the eighteenth century, the West’s interest in the exotic was matched with a rival gaze from the East. The fluid seams where the so-called dualities met have generated powerful spaces of tension: Occident, Orient; master, colonized; and public, private. The elite Muslim Ottoman women’s agency in dress via adoption of corsets, tight-fitting dresses and the adoption of overstuffed seating furniture modeled after the Turkish divan in the West resulted in an unprecedented conflict between furniture, the body and the dress. The inclusion of the body and its dress in the discourse helps to construct an interior design theory that deals with the immediate, experiential role of the body unlike the abstract body in space, which served architectural theory for centuries. Furthermore, the body fosters social manifestation of spaces. This is the fascinating story of a cultural exchange between women: an exchange of divans and corsets.     

Unequally Adrift: How Social Class and College Context Shape Students’ Mentorship Experiences

Faculty mentorship is a highly advantageous yet under-explored form of social capital which can grant access to co-curriculars (e.g., research assistantships), ensure strong letters of recommendation, and more. It is also typically informal and dependent on student initiative, requiring that students be skilled at engaging educational authority figures. Privileged students are most likely to have such skills as part of their dominant cultural capital, making faculty mentorship a site of social reproduction. To explore variations in this process, I compare two institution types: a small, teaching/undergraduate-focused regional university and a large, research-intensive flagship. In interviews with 68 working- and upper-middle-class students, I find that college context mediates the relationship of class background and faculty mentorship. Upper-middle-class students fostered advantageous faculty relationships at both universities, but working-class students diverged: at the flagship, they rarely approached professors in search of mentorship, while those at the regional university described close, beneficial connections with professors. I discuss working-class students’ dissimilar experiences in terms of each university’s structural and cultural characteristics (organizational habitus), particularly their institutional focus and size. I argue that through their particular organizational features, colleges can both reproduce and reduce inequalities, challenging the determinacy of precollege socialization in education.     

Cultural Responses to Changing Gender Patterns of Migration in Georgia

In this paper, we explore how individual women cope with the tensions between economic forces encouraging temporary labour migration and cultural norms tying “proper” women to their homes and families. Combining in‐depth interviews with returned migrant women in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi with secondary migration data for the region, we illustrate the recent increases in Georgian women’s participation in international labour migration. Deteriorating economic conditions in Georgia leave women with few local opportunities to financially support their families, while institutional changes have altered the accessibility and attractiveness of international destinations, leading to increasing motivations and opportunities for women’s migration. Focusing on the contradictions between growing female migration and persistent adherence to cultural norms stigmatizing migration in Georgia, we explore the cognitive strategies migrant women employ in an attempt to balance internalized perceptions of acceptable gendered behaviour with their migration choices. Two key pathways of adaptation emerge: framing migration as a necessity rather than a choice and stressing the unique and individually exceptional nature of their own migration experience. We posit that these strategies may serve to limit the norm‐challenging nature of women’s migration in Georgia. Although migration is often described as an empowering experience for women, if women migrants work to present their migration in a way that fits within the bounds of traditional gender norms, these norms may be strengthened rather than challenged.     

Inequality and 21-year-olds' negotiation of uncertain transitions to employment: a Bourdieusian approach

Faced with uncertainty, how do young people navigate the transition from school to work? Applying Bourdieu's concept of habitus to the ‘fields’ of education and employment, I argue that past experience, family background and unequal access to economic, social and symbolic forms of capital differentiate their transitions. Drawing on the tenth wave of the Australian longitudinal Life Chances Study, we found that all of the twenty-five 21-year-olds interviewed expressed uncertainty when discussing their futures. However, those from high-income backgrounds with access to strong social, economic and cultural resources were better able to manage the risks arising from uncertainty than their counterparts from low-income backgrounds. The following article seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of young people's experiences at age 21 through the application of Bourdieu's conceptual framework. The interviewees’ habitus and cultivation of varying forms of capital tend towards social reproduction, yet also reveal opportunities for those considered ‘disadvantaged’ to mobilise their cultural resources. Bourdieu's model of the field, and its component conceptual tools, provide an explanatory frame to make sense of the seemingly incoherent paths that young people trace between education and employment.     

‘There is always this feeling of otherness’: exploring the lived experiences of visually impaired immigrant women in Canada

This paper explores the experiences of immigrant women with visual impairment in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) of Canada. Conceptually, the paper draws from feminist disability theory and critical scholarship on blindness to consider the discursive and material processes shaping women’s experiences across different socio-cultural contexts. Empirically, the paper draws from in-depth interviews with seven women. The analysis is organized around three themes. The first explores women’s understandings of visual impairment. The second examines the ways in which women’s experiences of visual impairment are shaped by meanings and attitudes that circulate within their cultural communities, and the extent to which immigration might challenge or reinforce these meanings. The third examines the shifting barriers and opportunities women face with respect to social and economic participation. We close by identifying the conceptual implications of our research.     

Getting onboard: women, access and serious leisure

This paper explores women’s experiences of accessing serious leisure. It responds to a perceived tendency in contemporary feminist theories of leisure to celebrate women’s ability to weave potentially empowering identities from discursive resources in leisure spaces and experiences. While this work creates much needed theoretical space for the exploration of women’s agency and self determination within leisure, there is little critical attention given to how women may first negotiate the complexity of their gendered lives to gain access to these sites and experiences. By drawing on the accounts of forty women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps, a form of serious leisure, this paper argues that accessing leisure is still an important aspect of women’s leisure experiences. Women cited here engage in active and conscious practices and performances to both justify their access to leisure and to enable their disengagement from demands associated with normative femininity. This paper concludes that to sideline questions of access serves to conceptually dislocate leisure from the wider patterns of women’s everyday lives and limits our understanding of how women perceive, use and give meaning to their serious leisure participation.