Authenticity Strategies: Navigating Perceived Role Incompatibility in the Country Music Industry

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Cultural Production and Circulation

Abstract

Marginalized workers in exclusive industries must manage the perceived incompatibility between their social identities and occupational roles. Research on strategies to manage this perceived incompatibility find that workers either attempt to minimize their marginalized identities or become hypervisible in the workplace. In this paper, I draw on 40 interviews with country music and Americana performers who are marginalized because of their race or gender and observations of 18 music showcases featuring 91 performers to identify how marginalized workers attempt to establish their authenticity in an exclusive industry. I find that there are at least three authenticity strategies marginalized workers draw on: self-characterization, convention expertise, and the construction of counternarratives. This paper makes two contributions. First, marginalized workers’ authenticity strategies complicate the divide between strategies toward invisibility and hypervisibility. Through authenticity strategies, workers strategically emphasize specific aspects of their identity to reconcile the perceived incompatibility of their identity and their work. Informed by the field’s authenticity discourse, workers frame themselves and produce their work in ways they hope will give them the best opportunity to be evaluated favorably by others. Additionally, this paper extends previous research on “authenticity-maneuvering” to consider how marginalized workers, as opposed to marginalized consumers, navigate the symbolic economy of authenticity.

Author

• Katherine Beekman, Vanderbilt University