Symbolic Capital and Gender: Evidence from Two Cultural Fields

Bourdieu, Reputation, and Gender

Symbolic capital is the ‘degree of accumulated prestige, celebrity, consecration, or honor’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 7) that a person possesses within a social space, usually a cultural field; it is the reputation of a participant in a field, among other field members. Like all forms of capital, symbolic capital is exchangeable for other resources, like performance or work opportunities, social support, or media attention.

Symbolic capital is a particularly sought-after resource because it affords individuals the ability to ‘consecrate’ people, objects and practices as aesthetically legitimate (Bourdieu, 1993: 15). Tastemakers, and those who are highly regarded by others (i.e. those who possess symbolic capital), have more of a ‘right to speak and be heard’ (Jarvinen and Gundelach, 2007). They can influence what counts as good or bad art and what criteria should underlie those judgments. Symbolic capital is also a medium through which other forms of capital are exchanged. When cultural, social, or economic capital is recognized as legitimate, it becomes prestige or symbolic capital, which permits access to other resources (Bourdieu, 1990; Jarvinen and Gundelach, 2007). Displaying refined tastes (a type of cultural capital) only affords access to work opportunities or better social networks when one acquires a reputation as having refined taste – that is, when cultural capital becomes symbolic capital.

Bourdieu began to theorize how gender relates to symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984: 107–8, 1990, 2001), but his ideas remain underdeveloped. He views women as crucial to the intergenerational reproduction of taste and prestige. Women oversee their families’ symbolic and cultural capital by purchasing status-laden goods, passing tastes onto their children, and organizing the family’s cultural activities (Bourdieu, 2001: 99–100). However, this treats women as stewards of their husbands’ and families’ cultural and symbolic capital rather than capital-accumulating subjects (Lovell, 2000) and ignores how women accumulate and benefit from prestige in their own right. As women participate in cultural fields primarily as individuals, not wives and mothers, this is a significant gap.

In his most developed gender analysis, in Masculine Domination, Bourdieu (2001) conceptualizes gender relations as a dominant/dominated relationship, with men dominating women as the upper classes dominate the lower. He argues that this domination is maintained through symbolic violence; it is misrecognized as legitimate and therefore less susceptible to contestation (Bourdieu, 2001). This argument has been thoroughly critiqued by feminist scholars for treating men and women in simplistic, binary terms, reducing gender to sexual differentiation, and treating gender as ahistorical (Adkins and Skeggs, 2004; Mottier, 2001; Silva, 2005; Thorpe, 2009). However, it provides at least two insights into how gender structures symbolic capital. First, Bourdieu implicitly recognizes that evaluation can be shaped by gender: his argument that we view male domination and female submission as legitimate, and the reverse as illegitimate, describes how cultural beliefs about gender organize perception and evaluation. Conceptualizing reputation as gendered is therefore arguably consistent with Bourdieu’s understanding of domination. Second, and more importantly, symbolic violence is the mechanism through which the tastes and dispositions of dominant groups become valuable as cultural capital. We might therefore expect that masculine dispositions (which Huppatz (2009) views as masculine capital) will be more easily exchangeable for symbolic capital in more contexts than are feminine dispositions. Notably, however, Bourdieu’s work on symbolic violence describes relations between men and women as groups, and ignores how gender shapes individual men’s and women’s ability to accumulate and use cultural and symbolic capital.

Bourdieu’s description of games of honor among the Kabyle (Bourdieu, 1990), implicitly describes how gender structures symbolic capital among individuals. Bourdieu shows that honor is central to Kabyle men’s daily lives, with important implications attached to how men eat and walk, and how much time they spend working or at home. Notably, Bourdieu analyzes honor primarily among men, merely hinting at the dynamics underlying women’s reputation. He notes that the Kabyle value different traits in women (e.g. modesty, restriction) and men (e.g. activity, strength), and argues that men and women occupy separate social spheres. This implies a separate, feminine economy of symbolic capital, with different qualities conferring prestige and perhaps even different mechanisms of exchange. However, Bourdieu does not develop this possibility, so it is unclear whether this feminine economy of symbolic capital existed.

In modern society where men and women do not occupy separate spheres, but largely participate in the same occupational and cultural fields, theorizing a separate feminine economy of symbolic capital may be problematic. Instead, sociologists have looked for gender differences in individuals’ ability to accumulate and exchange prestige, and have theorized gendered dispositions as forms of capital. Dumais (2002) notes that children accumulate cultural capital in gendered ways; girls participate in more cultural activities (e.g. music and art lessons) than boys. Yet, in professional fields, men generally possess more cultural and symbolic capital, and benefit more from it. Stokes (2013) notes that in the field of fashion most designers are women, yet gay men achieve more recognition and esteem.

Other feminist Bourdieusian scholars have argued that embodied, gendered dispositions can function as capital. Thorpe (2009) shows that in the field of competitive snowboarding, cultural and symbolic capital are based on masculine dispositions like risk-taking and physical prowess. Huppatz (2012) similarly conceptualizes benefits derived from a masculine or feminine disposition as ‘masculine capital’ and ‘feminine capital’, respectively. She contrasts these to male and female capital, which are benefits derived from having a male or female body. Huppatz argues that women can enact masculine capital (i.e. a masculine disposition) and men can enact feminine capital (i.e. a feminine disposition), but notes that using cross-gender capital is often risky. Women in male-dominated occupations often adopt masculine dispositions, but others might not find those dispositions credible (Huppatz, 2009). Men can access feminine capital – for example, a male nurse who emphasizes his caregiving abilities – but may experience social stigma as a result (Huppatz and Goodwin, 2013). Notably, the field within which action is situated affects how embodied, gendered forms of capital are valued. In nursing, social work, hairdressing, and exotic dancing, feminine capital is useful (Huppatz, 2012); in male-dominated fields like snowboarding (Thorpe, 2010), masculine capital is more valuable. This work provides a useful vocabulary with which to integrate embodied, gendered capital into Bourdieu’s work. Here, I extend Thorpe’s (2009) and Huppatz’s (2009; Huppatz and Goodwin, 2012) work by interrogating the mechanisms through which gendered dispositions are exchangeable for symbolic capital.

Empirical evidence from different fields of cultural production already suggests that gender structures the mechanisms by which skills, knowledge, and dispositions become symbolic capital. Women are frequently marginalized as cultural producers across fields, including visual arts (Finney, 1993; Cowen, 1996), classical music (Goldin and Rouse, 2000), fashion design (Stokes, 2013) and screenwriting (Bielby and Bielby, 1996). Collectively, such findings suggest a broader underlying dynamic: that field actors’ evaluations of each other are patterned by gender. Linking these findings to the concept of symbolic capital facilitates comparisons across cultural fields, and between cultural fields and other settings such as workplaces. Integrating gender analysis into symbolic and cultural capital also allows us to identify key junctures at which gender matters: for example, whether women are disadvantaged in acquiring cultural capital, converting cultural capital into symbolic capital, converting symbolic capital into other resources, or some combination of all of these. Importantly, we should expect the gendered structure of symbolic capital to vary across cultural fields. As the contrast between Huppatz’s (2009) and Thorpe’s (2009) work shows, different fields value different gendered embodiments as forms of capital. Although I highlight the institutionalization of symbolic capital and boundary-drawing as important features here, other structural features might shape the gendered economy of symbolic capital in other fields.

Two Music Scenes

The folk and heavy metal music scenes are both grassroots music scenes, as opposed to music industries (see Lena (2012) on scenes vs. industries). Each scene centers on a community of people who collaborate to write, perform, and appreciate music on an unpaid or poorly paid basis. Most field participants, including musicians and support personnel, maintain sources of income outside of the fields and do music-related work on a freelance basis. Other characteristics shared by scene-based music genres include resource scarcity, a lack of corporate organizations (e.g. major record labels), minimal coverage by mass media, and dress and slang that distinguish insiders from outsiders (Lena, 2012).

Rather than conceptualizing folkies and metalheads as part of a broader ‘field of music’, I view each scene as a separate field. For Bourdieu (1993), field members have stakes in the same game and orient their actions toward each other (Leschziner, 2007). But, there is little, if any, crossover between resources, institutions, or actors in the folk and metal scenes. Metalheads are generally unaware of and unconcerned with who is popular among folkies, and vice versa. Folkies and metalheads do not share social networks, venues, resources, or institutions; folk festivals, performers’ associations, and industry conferences focus on folk music, not music in general. These two scenes are therefore best viewed as separate domains of action; that is, separate fields of cultural production.

The Toronto folk and metal fields are ideal sites to understand the gendered structure of symbolic capital because, as grassroots music scenes, they are structurally similar; however, gender relations in these fields differ markedly. By holding constant as many aspects of field structure as possible (e.g. resource scarcity, a lack of corporate organizations, a lack of mass media coverage), it is easier to pinpoint differences that matter for gender relations. Grassroots music scenes are also particularly appropriate for studying the gendered structure of symbolic capital, as they are informal networks of people who constantly evaluate each other. Musicians evaluate other musicians when deciding who to play with, booking agents evaluate musicians when deciding who to hire, and critics evaluate musicians when deciding which artists to review and how to frame their music. As these fields, like most cultural fields, are characterized by uncertainty, past success or reputation becomes an important standard in these decisions. Musicians and support personnel in grassroots music scenes have incentives to display markers of their good reputations as prominently as possible. Both the criteria on which symbolic capital are based and the consequences of symbolic capital should be highly visible and amenable to study.

Importantly, the folk and metal scenes differ in their level of organization. Virtually all metal-focused record labels, recording studios, and promotions companies are casual, part-time operations run by an individual freelancer without employees. Although part-time freelance support personnel are also common in the folk scene, there they coexist with formal, bureaucratic organizations. Most folk festivals are run by standing, bureaucratic, registered non-profit organizations (e.g. Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario, is run by the Mariposa Folk Foundation) with elected boards of directors. The folk field also includes professional associations analogous to the American Sociological Association (e.g. Folk Music Ontario, Folk Music Canada).

These two fields also differ demographically. Men outnumber women in all roles in the metal scene: approximately 15–35 percent of most audiences, 10–20 percent of support personnel, and fewer than 5 percent of musicians are women. Among folkies, women are a slight majority of audiences (approximately 50–65%), and almost half of performers and support personnel (approximately 40%–50%). Heavy metal audiences and performers are generally in their early 20s to mid-40s; folk audiences and performers span all age groups, although most audience members tend to be 50 and older. In both scenes, most participants are white. ¹

Methods

I draw on data collected using participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis of publicly available texts such as CD reviews, blog posts offering advice to musicians, and promotional materials. I conducted participant-observation at events including concerts, festivals, DJ nights, open mic nights, and industry conferences. I attended 30 heavy metal events and 40 folk events, in sessions ranging from 1.5 to 8 hours and averaging 3.5 hours. I spent approximately 130 hours in the folk field and 100 hours in the metal field. I attended shows and events that spanned all available music sub-genres in each field; for example, thrash, black, death metal, and more in the metal field, and bluegrass, contemporary singer-songwriter, folk revival, and more in the folk field. During fieldwork I behaved primarily as an audience member, but also formally volunteered at four folk festivals, three metal shows, and two industry conferences. In the field, I frequently asked in situ questions to explore theoretically interesting remarks; for example, in response to a comment like ‘I really like this next performer’ I would ask, ‘what do you like about them?’, to understand better the standards on which field members based their evaluations. I disclosed my status as a researcher at the earliest socially appropriate opportunity, and field members generally responded with interest, enthusiasm, polite inquiries, and unsolicited offers of assistance.

I conducted interviews with men and women musicians, fans, support personnel, and critics. I conducted 35 interviews in the metal field, 18 with men and 17 with women, and 28 interviews in the folk field, 12 with men and 16 with women. I met 42 of 63 interviewees through fieldwork, and was referred to another 15 interviewees. I located and approached the remaining six interviewees based on publicly available contact information; for example, I identified critics by reading local folk-oriented and metal-oriented publications and contacted them via email addresses listed in those publications, and I identified booking agents by contacting promoters or promotions companies listed on concert flyers.

I conducted discourse analysis of publicly available texts such as album and concert reviews, blog posts, and artist biographies, and other promotional materials. I analyzed approximately 30 texts from each field, of approximately 200–1000 words each. In analyzing fieldwork, interview, and textual data, I focused on the praises and critiques that people made of each other, which revealed the evaluative standards on which field members base symbolic capital.

Findings

Two aspects of field structure shape how symbolic capital is gendered in the folk and metal fields: the availability of institutionalized markers of symbolic capital, and the level of symbolic boundary-drawing around people and music that belong in each field. High institutionalization and low boundary-drawing in the folk field reduce the extent to which symbolic capital is structured by gender, while low institutionalization and high boundary-drawing in the metal field have the opposite effect.

These field characteristics produce different gender dynamics. In metal, male capital and masculine capital – advantages derived from having a male body and from enacting a masculine disposition, respectively (Huppatz, 2009) – are valuable currencies, and easily produce prestige. Conversely, having a female body or enacting a feminine disposition has minimal value; female and feminine capital actually diminish metalheads’ reputations and produce negative symbolic capital. In the folk field, there are no significant advantages or disadvantages associated with having either a male or female body; accordingly, male and female capital do not really function as capital. However, both masculine and feminine dispositions are exchangeable for symbolic capital. These two gendered patterns of capital exchange contribute to gender inequality in the metal field, and equality in the folk field.

Institutionalization of Symbolic Capital

Bourdieu (1997) argues that cultural capital can exist in institutionalized form. He considers educational credentials an institutionalized form of cultural capital because a degree is an official recognition of valuable knowledge, skills, and dispositions. When reputation or esteem is officially recognized, as in winning an award or another juried prize, we can similarly view it as institutionalized symbolic capital. Table 1 outlines the most common markers of symbolic capital in the folk and metal fields, and the extent to which we can view them as institutionalized.

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Table 1.

Symbolic capital in grassroots music scenes.

Level of Institutionalization	Markers/Signals	Organizational Affiliation
Strong	Awards; government grants; festival performances; other juried honors or performance opportunities	Major organizations, e.g. government granting agencies, non-profit festival foundations, or musicians’ associations
Moderate	Being booked for gigs regularly; playing with major/professional artists; coverage in scene-specific media	Informal organizations, e.g. independent media outlets, freelance concert promoters
Weak	Buzz/word of mouth; having one’s music shared via social media	None

The most strongly institutionalized forms of symbolic capital are awards, government grants, and juried performance opportunities. These honors are relatively official recognition of esteem because they are typically allocated by committees of practicing musicians, critics and support personnel acting on behalf of major organizations such as non-profit festival foundations or government granting agencies.

Symbolic capital in the folk field is often strongly institutionalized. Folk artists regularly compete for major cross-genre awards like Junos, and genre-specific awards like the Canadian Folk Music Awards (CFMAs). There are over 30 folk festivals each summer in Ontario alone, and hundreds in North America, most of which are governed by standing non-profit foundations with artistic selection committees. Folk artists also regularly apply for federal, provincial, and municipal grants. In their promotional material, folk artists commonly mention awards and grants they have received and festivals at which they have performed, because they know that other field members attend to this information.

The metal field offers few strongly institutionalized markers of symbolic capital. No metal musicians that I interviewed or encountered in fieldwork mentioned applying for grants. There is no metal-focused genre-specific award equivalent to the CFMAs, and Toronto metal artists rarely compete for cross-genre awards like Junos – in fact, the Junos’ ‘metal and hard music’ category was only revived in 2012, and combines heavy metal with other genres like punk and hard rock. Furthermore, juried competitions (e.g. a battle-of-the-bands contest for a prestigious performance opportunity) in the metal scene are rare, occurring once per year or less. Although winning a Juno or juried competition certainly boosts a metal band’s prestige, these opportunities are the exception rather than the rule.

Moderately institutionalized forms of symbolic capital indicate the less-official approval of small-time organizations. Being regularly booked for gigs and being featured in scene-based media (i.e. publications produced by and for field members) signal esteem among independent media outlets and freelance concert promoters. These moderately institutionalized forms of symbolic capital signal that a musician is well-liked by a few booking agents and critics, but do not suggest the official endorsement of a major organization. Moderately institutionalized markers of symbolic capital – being booked regularly for gigs, and featured in scene-based media – are common in both scenes, as they are routine practices in scene-based music genres (Lena, 2012).

The least institutionalized form of symbolic capital is ‘buzz’ or word-of-mouth. Buzz reflects the opinion of individual field members, usually fans, with no organizational affiliation. Buzz can spread through literal word-of-mouth, as people attend events and hear which artists their friends are talking about. Buzz can also spread online, as field members share audio and video recordings of artists through social media. In the metal scene, buzz is quite important, and metal fans described many local bands that had become popular through word-of-mouth. Conversely, in the folk scene, buzz is only one of many signals of esteem, and folkies are generally not as oriented toward buzz as metalheads.

Importantly, moderately institutionalized forms of symbolic capital tend to reproduce other forms of symbolic capital. When choosing artists to feature, booking agents and critics consider which artists will draw audiences to their shows or visitors to their websites; that is, they gauge how much symbolic capital artists have accumulated, assessing available indicators like who has won awards, and who is being buzzed about. Derek, a freelance metal concert promoter, says that:

I’m also actively searching bands online. I’m always up to date with what’s going on on Facebook. I’m always adding as many people that are into metal as possible. And when they post bands, I listen to them. I get a general feeling, if a lot of people are talking about a band from Montreal, then it’s more enticing [to book them].

Derek is deliberately attentive to word-of-mouth. Although buzz is subjective and fleeting, and a very unstable standard on which to base business decisions, it is one of the only available indicators of metal artists’ reputations, and so he uses it. A moderately institutionalized form of symbolic capital – being booked for gigs – is influenced by the weakly institutionalized ‘buzz’.

In folk, local media mentions and gig bookings are easily forthcoming for artists with institutionalized symbolic capital like awards or festival performances. Before a music award ceremony or prestigious festival, folk DJs often present themed shows dedicated to award nominees or festival performers. And many performers mentioned that ‘breaking into the festival circuit’ had secured them access to more gigs. Instead of tempering the fact that symbolic capital is more strongly institutionalized in folk than in metal, moderately institutionalized symbolic capital actually exaggerates this tendency.

The lack of institutionalized symbolic capital in the metal field disadvantages women. Buzz is subjective and unquantifiable, and without explicit evaluative criteria people often draw on familiar, unexamined standards like gender stereotypes (Ridgeway, 2011). This is why detailed job descriptions decrease gender inequality in hiring (Britton and Logan, 2008), and laying out clear standards by which jobs are classified as ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled’ reduces the tendency to undervalue feminine-typed jobs (Steinberg, 1990). Jurors in the folk scene who allocate awards and grants often use structured scoring systems, evaluating artists on stated criteria like technical skill, creativity, and stage presence. This structured process reduces the opportunity for gender bias by forcing jurors to reflect on the reasoning behind their judgments. Structured scoring also draws jurors’ attention toward specific qualities of the music and away from the performers themselves, reducing the opportunity for their judgments to be implicitly based on male, female, masculine, or feminine capital. In contrast, metalheads do not deliberately attend to their evaluative criteria before mentioning a band to a friend or sharing media online, leaving the weakly-institutionalized ‘buzz’ highly susceptible to gender bias and to influence by fans’ perceptions of the musicians in addition to the music.

Although institutionalized symbolic capital reduces gender bias in folk, it does not produce perfect gender equality. Approximately 40–45 percent of musicians at tending folk music industry conferences in Ontario in 2012–13 were women. Based on a count of publicly-available online information, I found that roughly 30 percent of Ontario folk festival performers and 35 percent of award nominees in the same period were women. Assuming that musicians at industry conferences are a reasonable approximation of the musicians who are actively producing music and looking for performance opportunities, this suggests that women folk performers win awards and festival performance slots at slightly lower rates than men. Women musicians can clearly achieve recognition, but there remains a gender gap in the allocation of institutionalized symbolic capital.

The most common form of symbolic capital among metalheads, the weakly institutionalized word-of-mouth, is highly gendered. In everyday interaction, evaluations of musicians by fans, critics, and support personnel draw on gender-laden standards. Field participants praise musicians for displaying stereotypically masculine attributes like toughness and domination, and for producing music that is ‘brutal’, ‘crushing’ and ‘aggressive’. A masculine disposition, or masculine capital (Huppatz, 2009), effectively produces esteem or symbolic capital.

Conversely, both female bodies and traditionally feminine dispositions – female and feminine capital – are generally evaluated disfavourably, and function as negative symbolic capital. Metalheads critique both people and bands for displaying emotion, a feminine-typed disposition. Luke, a white fan in his 30s, makes such a criticism when he describes disliking ‘whiny’ or ‘pansy’ metal. Furthermore, simply having a woman member can negatively impact a band’s reputation. Metal bands with women members are frequently criticized for (supposedly) drawing attention to their women members, rather than highlighting the quality of their music. James, a metal vocalist, echoes a common belief that ‘there’s a lot of bands that are female-fronted that rely solely on [the female vocalist] and the guitarists take a holiday and play something really boring’. Others referred to women performers as ‘gimmicks’. In this context a female body, or female capital, produces negative symbolic capital for women performers, and potentially their bandmates as well.

The easy conversion of feminine dispositions and female bodies into negative symbolic capital is facilitated by the subjective, uninstitutionalized nature of buzz. Critiques of bands with women members – that they were gimmicky, or untalented – spread through word-of-mouth or casual conversation. Unlike folk jurors who attend to the reasoning behind their evaluations, metalheads’ in-the-moment judgments of bands as ‘pansy metal’ or performers as ‘gimmicky’ are fairly spontaneous and unexamined. Consequently, these evaluations are easily colored by pre-existing gender stereotypes. Importantly, I found no evidence that women metal performers actually attempt to trade on their appearances, or draw attention to their femininity, as James and others suggest. Women more often minimize their femininity to avoid the potential loss of reputation that comes with a female body. The following description is typical of women metal performers:

[the woman guitarist] has long, wavy blonde hair that she doesn’t seem to have styled in any way. She wears a shapeless black band t-shirt and baggy jeans, and no makeup … and shows a distinct lack of attention to her appearance. Her physical movements on stage are similar to her male bandmates; she moves fairly little, but when she does it’s in a lumbering, masculine way. It’s almost like she’s trying to ‘pass’ for a guy. She often lets her hair fall in front of her so that it covers her face, and does not make eye contact with the audience. (field notes, 5 April 2012)

This performer carefully avoids using either female or feminine capital. She minimizes her female body by hiding it under baggy clothes and cultivates a decidedly un-feminine disposition. Neither female nor feminine capital is valuable currency in this space, so she attempts to access masculine capital instead, adopting a masculine appearance and disposition to position herself as a credible metal performer. This is a common self-presentation among woman metal performers. Of course, many other women musicians wear visibly feminine clothing, make-up, and hairstyles; however, even performers with feminine appearances tend to adopt masculine dispositions on stage. They swear, drink heavily, and stomp around the stage with deliberate, confident movements. This is a strategic attempt to offset the risks of female capital, or having a visibly feminine body, by accessing masculine capital.

In summary, the availability of institutionalized symbolic capital shapes gender relations among folkies and metalheads by affecting how gendered embodiments produce symbolic capital. The formal processes through which institutionalized symbolic capital is allocated in the folk field draw jurors’ attention away from Huppatz’s (2009) four forms of gender capital, and encourage jurors to focus on other standards such as instrumental skill or originality in songwriting. However, in the metal field word-of-mouth is often based on implicit, unexamined standards, and is highly susceptible to gender bias. Metal performers are positively evaluated for their performances of masculinity in addition to the quality of their music. Masculine capital, but not feminine capital, produces prestige in the metal field.

Symbolic Boundary-Drawing

The gendered elements of symbolic capital are also affected by the level of symbolic boundary-drawing (Gieryn, 1983) in each field. Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions between people, practices, and objects that symbolically distance some things from others (Lamont and Molnar, 2002). When individuals define themselves in opposition to some real or imagined group, they do boundary work (Gieryn, 1983). Metalheads are deeply invested in symbolic boundary work, and in determining what is ‘metal’ and ‘not metal enough’ (compare Figures 1 and 2).

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Figure 1.

An iron-on patch sold by Toronto metal band Skull Fist.

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Figure 2.

A promotional poster for a local folk show.

Figure 1 shows a typical example of symbolic boundary-drawing in the metal field: an iron-on patch with a band name and the words ‘no false metal’. This patch calls on metalheads to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘false’ metal, and to reject or exclude ‘false’ metal. Of course, the boundary separating ‘real’ from ‘false’ metal is highly subjective and contested; still, most metalheads are certain that this boundary exists.

In contrast, there is hardly any boundary-drawing around genres that do not belong in the folk scene. Figure 2 shows one of the few examples of symbolic boundary drawing in folk: a show poster asking ‘where have all the folk songs gone?’ Compared to the proclamation that ‘false metal’ should be rejected, the boundary work done in this poster is quite mild. Folkies are hesitant to exclude any genre from the folk umbrella, often preferring the more inclusive term ‘roots’ music, and defining folk music as one genre within the roots stream. Maynard, a musician and festival director, explained that roots music is:

music that sort of evolved out of the ground. Like in the southern USA, um, blues music came from the slaves chanting. … every culture in the world has some sort of music that just came out of their being, out of their circumstances. To me, that’s roots music. So, out of roots music can come blues, bluegrass, mountain music, folk music … I’m not a rap fan but to me that, roots music, like where you live, I think it came out of Manhattan, is where it originated. And that’s the type of music that comes out of people that are, um, on the street.

While metalheads seek to exclude ‘false’ metal, folkies symbolically expand their field to encompass rappers and hip-hop artists. Another Ontario festival director who booked a hip-hop artist defended her decision with a similar argument: that rap, like folk, is written by ordinary people negotiating their everyday lives through music. This inclusive view of folk and roots music is exemplified in a quote, usually attributed to Louis Armstrong, which I frequently heard from folkies and even saw in conference and festivals programmes: ‘all music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing it’. In this symbolic positioning, any genre of music written by ‘regular folk’, rather than manufactured by a commercial music industry, is acceptable folk music.

Because of this low symbolic boundary-drawing, a show asking ‘Where Have All the Folk Songs Gone?’ takes on a different tone than a patch symbolically excluding ‘false metal’. This show does not differentiate ‘real’ from ‘false’ folk music. It celebrates a specific genre within the folk/roots umbrella – folk revival – without excluding other genres; there is no suggestion that folk revival is ‘real folk’ while bluegrass is ‘not folk enough’. In fact, the concept of music being ‘not folk enough’ was hardly present in the folk scene.

Boundary-drawing in the metal field does not always explicitly reference gender, although non-metal genres are occasionally symbolically positioned as lacking positive masculine-typed qualities like brutality and aggression. However, even when this boundary-drawing does not reference gender, it still disadvantages women. The emphasis on separating ‘real’ from ‘false’ metal reinforces the overall importance of symbolic boundaries among metalheads. It creates a competitive, conflict-oriented atmosphere in which metalheads continually seek to position their music as ‘real metal’ or themselves as ‘real metalheads’, and others music and people as ‘false’. Because this boundary-drawing exists in a context where masculine capital is valued, and feminine and female capital are devalued, gender becomes a particularly effective tool with which to discredit others.

Metalheads draw boundaries against people in addition to genres; specifically, many metalheads symbolically position women as false or inferior metal fans. Women in the metal scene are assumed to be ignorant of metal music and history. As Summer, a white, 24-year-old fan, explains:

being a woman into metal, you have to prove yourself twice as hard. You need to go to twice as many shows, read up on the bands twice as hard, listen to them twice as hard. It’s a predominantly male genre. So when a girl comes in, you know, hey boobs and blonde hair, oh fuck, it’s somebody’s girlfriend. And you sit them down and take them to school. It’s awesome. [laughs]

A few things are notable about Summer’s explanation. First, metalheads not only draw boundaries around legitimate producers of metal, but also around who is a legitimate metal fan. These boundaries are also drawn along specifically gendered lines. Second, note that Summer does not describe one or two isolated moments where her right to speak was challenged, but an ongoing reality. She has so often encountered skepticism about her metal fandom that she simply generalizes about her experiences. This dismissive attitude toward women is stabilized and reproduced through texts, such as

Figure 3, which shows the title and lead photo of a blog post that circulated online among members of the Toronto metal scene. The premise of this post is that women attend metal shows for reasons unrelated to the music: they like metal fashion or culture, or are seeking male attention. This generalization is presented jokingly, but when this belief is repeated frequently and publicly, it reproduces the long-standing association of female and feminine capital with negative symbolic capital and affects women’s ability to develop reputations as credible metal fans and performers.

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Figure 3.

The headline and lead photo of a satirical blog post on women in metal.

While having a female body or a feminine disposition produces negative symbolic capital in the metal field, a male body or masculine disposition has the opposite effect, signifying belonging, rightness, and authority. Catherine, a white music journalist in her mid-20s, argues that the ideal-typical metalhead is male:

If you conjure the idea of who’s a metalhead in your head, it’s a dude. It’s a dude who probably has long hair, they’re probably wearing an unreadable shirt. They may have a beard. You know, they like beer a lot. There’s sort of that stereotype, right? And the stereotypical metalhead is a dude, for sure.

Catherine’s comments indicate that having a male appearance (long, unkempt hair and a beard) and a masculine disposition (an affinity for beer) indicates one’s ‘metalness’. These signifiers indicate that one belongs in the metal field, and can legitimately speak about it and for it. In contrast, being a woman is ‘not metal’. Women metalheads must prove that they belong despite their femininity, while men are assumed to belong because of their masculinity. Metalheads draw symbolic boundaries that include male bodies and masculine dispositions, and exclude female bodies and feminine dispositions.

Because of this belief that femininity is ‘not metal’, women can have their authority questioned at any time. Catherine further describes a consequence of women’s difficulty accumulating symbolic capital: a recurring interaction colloquially known as the ‘pop quiz’:

the pop quiz is always very interesting. It’s often part of any first-time interaction I have with just about any metalhead is that they always have to test you to figure out if you actually know what you’re talking about or not. So, like one of my favorite things is that somebody I don’t know will come up to me and be like, ‘I really like your shirt.’ ‘Oh thanks.’ ‘What’s your favorite album by them?’ … it’s because you want to see if I have an answer, not because you’re curious what the answer is.

Like Summer, Catherine frequently encounters people who assume that she is not knowledgeable about metal, even though she writes about metal music professionally. Also like Summer, Catherine does not describe a specific incident where someone was condescending to her; she generalizes about a common experience.

Of course, many metalheads reject these stereotypes. Craig, a venue owner and booker, says:

There’s so many groups with female members that have totally earned the respect of their peers … I mean, one local band, there’s a girl Helen who … can play circles around just about anybody in this city. And you know, people, men are always like, oh wow, a good looking girl has got a guitar. You know? And then she plays and they’re just like, wow, amazing. And that’s a typical example of people not expecting anything, and just being like sort of blown away.

Irena, a promoter, similarly rejects this stereotype:

I wouldn’t say that [woman are] taken less seriously, no. Um, I am personally a huge fan of women who take the time to put themselves out there and you know play metal or whatever. And I think that if anything they should be taken a little more seriously … some people probably do [believe gender stereotypes]. But I think in the most part, people are finally realizing that hey, chicks like this shit too. And it’s time to appreciate that.

Craig and Irena personally reject the idea that female bodies and feminine dispositions should produce negative symbolic capital. Yet they simultaneously acknowledge that others do make this association by holding stereotypes and low expectations of women in metal. Otherwise, audiences would not be ‘blown away’ by Helen’s talent and they would not have to ‘finally realize’ that women like metal; these things would already be assumed.

Because of the minimal boundary-drawing in the folk field, different types of gendered dispositions function as capital among folkies. Both masculine and feminine dispositions produce good reputations, as shown by Maynard’s praise of two women folk performers:

Liz, her ability to write, she’ll walk her kid to kindergarten on the first day. She’ll stop and she’ll write a three-minute song about one second in time that most people just miss, you know? … Rita, she’s an amazing singer. She astounds me … when I met Rita, it struck me from the first second that she was a palliative care nurse. Every day she went up to work with people who knew they were dying. … And she keeps smiling all the time and she writes about it and she just, whatever she does, she has that magical skill. (Maynard, folk musician and festival organizer)

Here, Maynard praises two women musicians for stereotypically feminine qualities. He links Liz’s and Rita’s appeal as performers to their nurturing roles, and to their ability to connect emotionally to an audience. In valuing these qualities, he treats their feminine dispositions as bases for symbolic capital. Aiden, a white, male folk performer in his late 20s, praises another folk musician for masculine traits:

What I love about Bethany … on stage, she’s a freight train. She’s an absolute freight train. You can go up there and turn your amp to 12 and play a wrong note over and over and over again, and it wouldn’t phase her. She’d just keep playing her song … And I mean, there’s times that she messes up, but it’s never a weak mess-up. It’s always a very strong mess-up. So you know instantly what’s happened. It’s just kind of like she hops tracks … and now she’s on this track. It’s like, oh, I’m now there too. That’s great.

Bethany has developed a reputation in the folk scene as a strong bandleader, and a highly competent and established performer, and Aiden highlights some stereotypically masculine characteristics that underlie this reputation: a commanding presence, leadership abilities, and an ability to quickly and confidently recover from mistakes without apology or even acknowledgment. These are all traits more commonly associated with men, particularly business leaders, than women. And yet, Bethany effectively uses these masculine dispositions (i.e. masculine capital) to achieve prestige in the folk field.

Because of the general emphasis on inclusiveness in the folk field, neither male nor female bodies (i.e. male or female capital) confer any particular advantages on performers. Many folk festivals and venues have formal hiring policies outlining a mandate to seek out both men and women performers and directing booking agents to create varied line-ups that include both men and women, span sub-genres within the folk/roots scene, and alternate between solo performers, duos, and bands. Even venues without hiring policies tend to regularly hire both men and women because the emphasis on inclusiveness and variety has become conventional; bookers view line-ups with both women and men as more varied and more interesting to audiences than single-gender line-ups. For these reasons, neither male nor female capital really functions as capital in the folk field.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that symbolic capital requires gender analysis. We do not evaluate each other as abstract, genderless human beings, but as men and women. Consequently, we must ask how gender organizes perception, evaluation, and reputation – that is, symbolic capital – in various cultural fields. This gendered analysis of symbolic capital improves our understanding of how cultural fields operate in general, and how capital exchange occurs within fields in particular. By linking the concept of symbolic capital with Huppatz’s (2009) concepts of male, female, masculine, and feminine capital, we can develop a theoretical framework that facilitates comparison of gendered patterns of capital exchange in different cultural fields. We can also begin to recognize patterns in a number of already published works on women’s marginalization as cultural producers.

I have also argued that a gendered analysis of capital exchange must be linked to an analysis of field structure. I have highlighted two structural features of the folk and metal fields that shape the extent to which gendered, embodied dispositions produce symbolic capital: the institutionalization of symbolic capital and the level of symbolic boundary-drawing around people and genres that belong in each field. In the metal field, the lack of institutionalized symbolic capital and the high level of boundary-drawing facilitate the valuing of male and masculine capital, and the devaluing of female and feminine capital; in these fields, women often experience difficulty accessing symbolic capital. In the folk field, officially recognized and systematically allocated markers of symbolic capital, along with low boundary-drawing and a generally inclusive ethic, create an environment where neither male nor female capital is particularly useful, and both masculine and feminine capital are. As non-economic forms of capital are deeply rooted in specific fields, this linking of gendered symbolic capital to field structure is crucial.

A logical next step would be to compare fields with different combinations of symbolic boundary-drawing and institutionalization. Here, I have compared a field with high institutionalization and low boundary-drawing to one with low institutionalization and high boundary-drawing. Yet from this we cannot be sure what gendered symbolic capital would look like in a field with high institutionalization and high symbolic boundaries, or a field with low institutionalization and low boundaries. Furthermore, as I have noted, different aspects of field structure may heighten or reduce the importance of gender in other cultural fields. Both music scenes studied here are grassroots music scenes, which raises the question of how gendered patterns of capital exchange might differ in experimental avant-garde genres (Lena, 2012), or corporate music industries. These structural differences between fields point to the importance of mapping out the exchange of cultural and symbolic capital in multiple cultural fields, to better understand what role embodied, gendered dispositions play in generating honour and esteem.

In this paper, I have focused on markers of symbolic capital, and the standards on which symbolic capital is based. To a lesser extent, I have touched on the gendered strategies that individuals use to accumulate and exchange symbolic capital. Another useful project would be a more thorough analysis of gendered strategies of capital accumulation. Particularly in fields that offer multiple, flexible standards on which esteem can be based, we may find that men and women strategically build qualitatively different types of reputations, or that different types of reputation are exchangeable for different social resources.

Still, the present paper has accomplished quite a lot. By extending previous Boudieusian feminist work that conceptualizes embodied, gendered dispositions as forms of capital (Huppatz, 2009; Thorpe, 2009), I have illustrated a key mechanism structuring gendered patterns of recognition and esteem among folkies and metalheads, and also provided a theoretical framework that can serve as a roadmap for future analyses of the gendered elements of symbolic capital in multiple fields of cultural production.