Cultural capital and hegemonic masculinity are two concepts that have received intense attention. While both have received serious consideration, critique and analysis, the context or field-specificity of each is sometimes ignored. They have been used in a diversity of ways. Using ethnographic and interview data from a US male bodybuilding community, this study highlights one useful employment. Hegemonic masculinity takes different shapes in different fields of interaction, acting as a form of cultural capital: gender capital. Inherent in this discussion are (...) the cultural contradictions apparent among individuals striving for either physical or ideological embodiments of gender capital. Individuals can attempt to embody hegemonic idealizations, but bodies are not only inscribed with gender, inscriptions are read, and read differently by different social actors and in different settings. The capacity of gender capital to remain elusive is precisely what enables gender practices and projects like bodybuilding to retain passionate participation. (shrink)

This paper considers how players of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) limited draft turn their acquired gameplay style or disposition (their MTG “gamer habitus”), with respect to drafting, into an object of knowledge. This is done in order to then consciously rework it, to respond to new formats and to the changing metagame. I will focus on a particular case study: how streamer Chord_O_Calls' instructional video shows his own re-evaluation of certain cards. Evidently, it is a process requiring reflexivity, although I (...) aim to be specific with regard to the particular “form of reflexivity” involved. I distribute this outward to the MTG “habit assemblage” (an ensemble of techniques, things, relations) and argue that any individual player's instantiation of this reflexivity involves a practice-based synthesis of paratexts from the MTG habit assemblage that is not codified but is shaped by the assemblage. This leads to a consideration of the “intelligence” and limits of not only particular habits but that of the MTG “habit assemblage” itself. I argue that the broader socio-technical significance of the form of reflexivity that is being proliferated here is one which is defined by its flexibility, by an attentional style of delayed and shifting categorization. (shrink)

This article proposes a rethinking of Bourdieu’s habitus as context-specific, multiple, and decentralized based on nine months of participant-observation fieldwork with dumpster divers in New York City. Dumpster divers are mostly white, college-educated people in their twenties and thirties who eat food from retail trash as a lifestyle choice. Sociologists have recently theorized culture as a fragmented, incoherent “toolkit” of cultured capacities acquired throughout the lifetime. Bourdieu on the contrary, theorized socialized culture as habitus, a relatively durable, classed structure acquired (...) during childhood. While he recognized the possibility of acquiring “specific” habitus (Bourdieu 2000) later in life, he never developed the theoretical implications of socialization across multiple contexts. Building on ethnographic evidence of dumpster divers’ contradictory pursuit of food taste through the distasteful behavior of eating from the trash, I develop an alternative model of habitus as interlinked bundles of dispositions acquired in specific contexts. To theorize the bundled quality of habitus, I introduce what I call the practical congruity of dispositions. I show how rather than being disparate elements of a cultural repertoire, ways of seeing, common sense, dexterity, and orientations “make sense” in conjunction as actors mobilize them in specific contexts: dumpster diving acquires a commonsensical character based on the practical sense practitioners acquire. My understanding of habitus goes beyond the fragmentation assumed in notions of culture as a repertoire of cultured capacities, on the one hand, and the continuity and coherence premised in notions of primary and secondary habitus, on the other hand. (shrink)