Fashioning Gender: Work-The Gendered Organization of Culture Industry Careers

• In Event: 035 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 19. Work and Inequality

Abstract

This article investigates the gendered organization of careers in culture industries. I use a case study of the fashion industry in Canada, including interviews with 63 fashion workers. As examples of industry-level careers, cultural careers offer important insights into the ways in which gendered logics are embedded in new and nonstandard work forms. Taking an industry-level, rather than organization-level approach, I identify two new gendered logics which contribute to the theory of gendered organizations. First, cultural careers are organized by insecurity and risk, requiring workers to perform what I call entrepreneurial labor strategies. Second, an ideology of passionate work frames cultural work as a “lifestyle,” blurring work-life boundaries, and encouraging workers to immerse themselves in the culture of their industry at all times. These logics assume an abstract worker with no outside responsibilities, disadvantaging women, especially working mothers and those without financial support. These logics organize work at the level of field or industry, not merely the organization, in ways that reproduce gender inequality. Since industry-level careers are becoming increasingly common, the addition of these logics to the gendered organizations framework can enrich future scholarship.

Author

• Allyson Stokes, University of Texas-Austin