Living Props: Background Actors and the Production of ‘Occupational Irrelevance’ in Film and Television

• In Event: 30609 - Cultural Studies

Abstract

This paper presents a novel understanding of the job of background acting by turning to the sociology of attention and its understanding of the background of everyday life. Here, we modify Zerubavel’s (2015) concept of the ‘social structure of irrelevance’ and demonstrate how it can be fruitfully applied to the study of work and occupations to consider the constitution and consequences of workplace inattention. Based on in-depth interviews with unionized and non-unionized background actors working in the Canadian screen industry, we identify three ‘backgrounding’ practices that naturalize the social, symbolic and material minimization of their labour: silencing, dividing, objectifying. Our discussion emphasizes how backgrounding, as an analytic that identifies day-to-day practices, makes useful distinctions between irrelevant work and other concepts for understanding devalued work (invisible work, hidden work) within low status occupations.

Authors

• Saara Liinamaa, University of Guelph

• Michael Follert, St Francis Xavier University