“Maybe it’s … skin colour?” How race-ethnicity and gender function in consumers’ formation of classification styles of cultural content

ABSTRACT

Race-ethnicity and gender, while rarely explicitly considered for cultural consumption choices, are characteristics that can function implicitly in the classification of cultural content like films, literature or music. Embedded in classification styles – recurrent classificatory patterns in the habitual ways people choose, weigh and combine classifications at their disposal – such attributes are important for consumption practices. Based on visual Q methodology and 27 interviews with American and Dutch rock music consumers, we examine how consumers attend to, weigh and lump classifications, and to what extent gender and race-ethnicity drive classification processes in rock music – a genre historically dominated by white men. We identify four classification styles that consumers employ, in which race-ethnicity and gender function as classificatory tools. The analysis reveals that the implicit classification of “good” rock music as white and male, even though this is rejected discursively, is key in keeping whiteness and masculinity in place.

KEYWORDS:

• Race-ethnicity
• gender
• cultural consumption
• cognition
• rock music
• Q methodology

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all respondents for their willingness to participate in this research project. We also thank Tim Dowd for research assistance in Atlanta and Koen van Eijck, John Lievens, Bram Spruyt, Dannie Kjeldgaard and the four anonymous reviewers for the valuable feedback they provided on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although “race” and “ethnicity” are distinct concepts and subject to considerable discussion in the United States (e.g. Wimmer 2015; Winant 2015), they are often used interchangeably in everyday discourse (for a comprehensive discussion, see Cornell and Hartmann 2006, 15–40). Generally, “race” is socially constructed as “a system for classifying people who are believed to share common descent, based on perceived innate physical similarities” (Morning et al. 2013, 265). “Ethnicity”, meanwhile, is typically established on perceived cultural similarities, namely as members of a similar ethnic group in which racial elements can – but not necessarily do – play a role. In the Netherlands, references regarding race are typically shunned and replaced by ethnic, cultural or national associations (Essed and Trienekens 2008; Weiner 2016). Having researched both national contexts, Essed (1996) suggests using the term “racial-ethnic” instead, variations of which we employ throughout this article. In the discussion of the results, we give prominence to the conceptualisations used by the respondents themselves.

2 All the data on the concourse, including the individual sorts of each respondent, are available upon request. The images were used through the fair use of copyrighted material for scientific purposes and so cannot be reproduced here.

3 Please note that statistical generalisation is not possible with (and is not the purpose of) Q methodology (Watts and Stenner 2012). “Significance” here refers to the factor, not the population. The calculation is as follows: p < 0.01 = 2.58*(1/√N), where N is the amount of items in the Q-set. This means that p < 0.01 = 0.4079 = ±0.41.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research [NWO project #322-45-003]; and a Fulbright Association grant for research exchange.

Notes on contributors

Julian Schaap

Julian Schaap is Assistant Professor Sociology of Music at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on social stratification on the basis of whiteness, race-ethnicity, and gender in various cultural fields.

Pauwke Berkers

Pauwke Berkers is Associate Professor of Sociology of Art and Culture at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He has published widely on issues of ethno-racial and gender inequality in arts and culture.