Abstract
Barada and Primorac offer a much-needed discussion on the social valuing of female creative labour. By drawing on empirical data on the cultural and creative sectors in Croatia, they show how the dictum that creative labour will be emancipatory for both women and men proved to be a techno-optimistic fallacy, since it encourages non-paid, underpaid, and self-exploitative practices, putting women in more precarious positions than men. Female creatives are facing the implosion of the public into the private sphere, while the social value of their work is decreasing. Technologies of creative labour contribute to contradictory practices that result in covert redomestication of female creatives. Faced with the feminization of their everyday life, female creatives find themselves trapped between a highly demanding profession and traditional gender roles. Labouring in the creative industries proves to be a golden cage for women.
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Notes
- 1.
The first research project was conducted in 2010 and 2011 and concentrated on the female visual communication designers in Croatia, executed by the first author of the chapter (Barada 2012). For the study, in the first research cycle, 8 expert interviews with theorists and design professionals were conducted, followed by 36 interviews with female visual communication designers combining biographical and semi-structured techniques. The interviews included designers from the 6 largest Croatian cities, thus providing a regional overview of the data. In addition, secondary and tertiary data on design and creative industries in Croatia were gathered and analysed. The second research project was carried out from 2014 to 2016, and it focused on the condition of work of employed persons in CSOs in the area of contemporary culture and arts in Croatia; it was executed by the authors of the chapter and Dr Edgar Buršić for the Kultura Nova Foundation (Barada et al. 2016). The conclusions from the materials are the authors’ only and are not the official position of the Kultura Nova Foundation. For this study, two online questionnaires were constructed: the first one was aimed at the institutional conditions of CSOs (N=93), and the second one gathered data from employees in those CSOs (N=111). Furthermore, 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted with long-term employees of CSOs in 9 Croatian cities. To contextualize all of the data, statistical analysis of the Foundation’s CSO database was undertaken. Both of these surveys used the mixed-methods approach and covered a time frame of more than 7 years, so the findings are complex and multilayered, giving a good basis for conceptualizing the changes and specific conditions of female creative work.
- 2.
In this chapter we define ‘feminist standpoint theory ’ as a joint term for an approach that was primarily developed by Dorothy E. Smith , Sandra Harding, Nancy M. Hartsock, and Patricia Hill Collins. Although any standpoint approach can have a more general research starting point than the position (or standpoint) from those that are researched, the adjective ‘feminist’ denotes that it deals with women and that it is developed by feminist authors. Such an approach researches the condition of women from women’s position. Dorothy E. Smith used the standpoint to develop feminist methodology, strategy, and finally sociology, taking into account the experience and position of women.
- 3.
Weeks relied on those standpoint theory authors who referred to the Marxist tradition of women’s work practices in late capitalist social relations. These are Hilary Rose, Nancy Hartsock , and Dorothy E. Smith (Weeks 2004 [1998], p. 184).
- 4.
By using feminist standpoint theory through women’s labour , the collective subjectivity of ‘a woman’ is constructed and situated between the unique position of a particular individual and a spontaneous, natural community of biological women (Weeks 2004 [1998], p. 189).
- 5.
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Barada, V., Primorac, J. (2018). In the Golden Cage of Creative Industries: Public-Private Valuing of Female Creative Labour. In: Bilić , P., Primorac, J., Valtýsson, B. (eds) Technologies of Labour and the Politics of Contradiction. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76279-1_7
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