Girls as elite distinction: The appropriation of bodily capital

•Sociology is undergoing an “accumulation of capitals” conceptually, but there is a relative absence of attention to appropriation and ownership.•Studies of the forms of capital emphasize individual assets as personal advantages within given fields.•This case study uses ethnography of VIP leisure scenes to show how men appropriate women's bodily capital, or “girl capital.”•Men use girl capital to generate symbolic, economic, and social capital.•Women are less able to convert their bodily capital into other forms of value due to symbolic boundaries which penalize them for strategic intimacy.

The capital concept has proliferated in studies of culture and stratification, usually depicting individual assets as personal advantages within given fields. Because this approach sidesteps issues of ownership, it obscures how unequal value can be generated through the appropriation of someone else's capital. Based on fieldwork in the global VIP party circuit from New York to Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organizers and patrons, I document the uses of women's bodily capital by men who appropriate women as a symbolic resource to generate profit, status, and social ties in an exclusive world of businessmen. I argue that women are unable to capitalize on their bodily capital as effectively through participation in the VIP scene because codes of sexual morality penalize women for strategic intimacy. By shifting the analysis of capital from individual advantages to systemic extra-individual advantages, this article brings appropriation into the study of culture and class. Further, this article genders the elite by documenting the cultural incompatibilities of femininity in elite men's social spaces.