The Women and Men Behind Burning Man: Emotion Management and the Limitations of Gender Equality in Lakes of Fire as a Decommodified Cultural Field


Natalie Adamyk, University of Toronto

Burning Man, an art-centered week-long camping event that takes place annually in Black Rock City, Nevada, is attended by tens of thousands each year. Along with its smaller counterpart “burns” that can be found throughout the rest of U.S. and the world, it constitutes a unique and vibrant cultural event. Beginning in 1986 when the original Burning Man was held by artists Larry Harvey, John Law and Jerry James on a San Francisco beach, the burner community has been notable for its commitment to the creation and maintenance of a decommodified, self-perpetuating community, which relies on gifting rather than a monetary economic system. Because of these values, burns require the extensive efforts of participants who contribute their time and unpaid labour in capacities such as building, creating art, running and/or volunteering with theme camps. More senior and/or higher-ranking members may sit on boards and committees that determine important functions such as choosing artists to receive art grants, and planning programming around efforts such as racial and LGBTQ+ inclusivity and increased awareness and practice of consent. At the heart of burns are the Ten Principles all burners are expected to follow: radical inclusion, gifting, de-commodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy. This presentation explores emotion management done by participants or “burners” at the regional Burning Man event Lakes of Fire in Montague, MI. As a yearly week-long camping and art-centered decommodified community taking place for a week in late June, members in the Lakes community requires adherence to the Ten Burner Principles, which enshrine the importance of values such as communal effort and personal immediacy. Building on existing Critical Events literature, this paper explores how burners utilize emotion management to create and sustain Lakes as a vibrant socio-cultural field. Through 40 interviews with men and women burners, I focus on participants’ emotion management to reveal the limitations of Lakes as a gender egalitarian space. While both men and women describe engaging in emotion management as camp leads, art organizers and rangers, women were more likely to expend greater emotional energy in nurturing and interpersonal roles, while men more frequently describe the importance of allowing women and other marginalized groups greater say in major policy and decision making. Men also often viewed themselves in supportive or otherwise complementary roles. This apparently egalitarian form of emotional labour, which requires men to “lean out” and re-centre women, tends to displace more acute emotion management onto women, particularly those centered around teaching newer burners the importance of both the Twelve Principles and practices around sexual consent. This research points out both the importance of emotion management in the continued maintenance and success of non-monetized cultural fields, and the gendered organization and often ensuing inequality in emotional division of labour.

This paper will be presented at the following session: