Bourdieu at World Pride 2017: types of capital within and around a tourist event

Abstract

Madrid’s LGBT Pride —lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans— is one of the city’s main events, and it includes one of the biggest demonstrations in the world advocating for gender and sexual diversity. In 2017 the event was even more relevant as the city hosted World Pride 2017, a global Pride under a brand owned by a multinational NGO. AEGAL, the main Madridian LGBT business association, was the direct holder of the event-brand, joined by activist NGOs and public administrations in order to organise an unprecedented Pride event, which made a wide range of agents negotiate. This article presents an analysis of such relations from the perspective of some of the key concepts in Pierre Bourdieu’s work, such as those of social field and, above all, capital. The different types of capital within the event are analysed in order to test the usefulness of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework for the study of events and, in general, of asymmetrical relations between agents.