| dc.description.abstract | This article is a distillation of an ethnography conducted in the fall of 2008 of
female rock instrumentalists performing in bands in the Tampa, Florida bay area.
The study looked into why there are comparatively very few female rock
instrumentalists (five percent of the total number of instrumentalists playing in
bands in the Tampa area), what social processes need to be in place for a woman
to get involved in a rock band, and what unique social challenges women face as
instrumentalists in a male-dominated field. The ethnography employs Pierre
Bourdieu’s work on fields of cultural production, specifically his ideas of embodied
cultural capital and habitus, to demonstrate that women are absent from rock
because they lack the unique cultural capital necessary to participate in rock
bands, and, furthermore, to explore what extraordinary social circumstances need
to be in place for women to accumulate this cultural capital. Specifically, in this
article I interpret Bourdieu’s theory to emphasize the importance of agency in his
concept of habitus, and to show how women rock instrumentalists, once they
manage to become involved in bands, develop strategies to make the most of their
minority position in a highly male-dominated field. Women instrumentalists in the
Tampa, Florida rock music scene develop particular strategies to cope with, exploit
and transform their disadvantaged position as women in a field where having a
male body is a dominant form of embodied cultural capital. | en_GB |
