LAUSR

M ore and more, “capital” is deployed for conceptualizing and theorizing around the many aspects of the self that can be leveraged for profit. In What Is Sexual Capital? Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz take on the titular form of capital to examine how sexuality, as it has historically progressed from traditional religious morals through a more secular modernity and entered the neoliberal era, has become inextricable from capitalist social structures. Although sexual capital is a relatively new term, it is not specific to our current era. Kaplan and Illouz demonstrate the historical connection between sexuality and its monetary consequences by examining how traditional Christian values tethered women’s chastity to their subordinate economic position. They discuss how the institutionalization of Victorian sexual mores restricted women’s sexual freedom and coupled with their inability to accumulate their own wealth, such that desirability and its corresponding access to wealth vis-á-vis men depended on women’s ability to position themselves in the Victorian sexual field as chaste. Here, sexual capital relied on women’s lack of sexual experience. However, as certain social restrictions waned, such as the erosion of laws and norms impeding interracial and interfaith marriages, sexuality became less restricted and increasingly viewed as a source of interpersonal pleasure. In turn, a new sort of rationality emerged wherein sexual capital became intertwined with the domestic household’s ability to produce. Production, in this sense, has a double meaning. On one hand, sexual activity should literally reproduce the household (and population) by way of offspring, while at the same time monogamous sexual activity within the marriage should produce docile workers capable of participating more fruitfully in the market economy. If workers, in this case men, are satisfied at home, their fortunes will multiply. Outside of the home, the waning power of restrictive sexual morals within the capitalist structure enabled a formidable marketplace of sexual capital. In this case, sexual capital was extracted as surplus value from the labors of the body. There are many ways people took advantage of this economic opportunity at the time, including the mid-century expansion of mass media