The Erotic Capital Onstage

Abstract

Recently, Catherine Hakim’s controversial book ‘Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital’, has put into debate the concept of ‘erotic capital,’ emphasizing the greater importance that this type of capital has for women. While many of the theses of this sociologist are hardly acceptable and have received strong and justified criticism from the feminist perspective, the concept of ‘erotic capital’ – previously defined by Green and derived from the idea of ‘capital’ coined by Bourdieu – is important and has been taken poorly into account within the social sciences and humanities. The idea of erotic capital fits well within the theoretical framework of the social presentation of the body, i.e. the conscious and voluntary way of showing the body in view of our social interactions both through all that we do in it and all that we do with it. Given that music as performance art is also embodied practice, in this chapter I will apply the concept of erotic capital to the music stage. Without forgetting the importance of gender differentiation in this issue, I will discuss the importance of distinguishing between ‘representation’ and ‘expression’ on the stage in order to understand how erotic capital actually appears and is instrumentalised in musical practices within current Western society. In this chapter, I am especially interested in exploring the display of erotic capital at the level of expression, taking into account both the display of erotic capital as a faithful reflex of a hypersexualised society and the different functions it can have within the complex dynamics of music performances onstage.