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

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 such attributes are important for consumption practices. Based on visual Q methodology and 27 interviews with American and Dutch rock music consumers, authors 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. 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.