Navigating an Unequal Playing Field of Cultural Production: An Intersectional Approach to Understand Creative Livelihoods

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 10) Markets and Inequalities: Gender, Livelihoods, and Social Justice

Abstract

Bourdieu’s field theory has been foundational to the study of cultural production in Western contexts. However, it has also been critiqued for its focus on social class to the exclusion of how race and gender processes also structure fields. Most critiques come out of studies of education and social mobility, with a budding literature in cultural fields. However, many studies examine the interaction of social class with either race or gender with fewer taking an intersectional approach that accounts for the imbrication of race, class, and gender processes. Understanding the ways in which the field of cultural production is shaped by class, race, and gender processes is important for making sense of the deep inequalities that persist in the field, inequalities that may otherwise seem paradoxical in a field that purports to value diversity, equity, and inclusion. Through the case study of an interracial, multiethnic, blended, heterosexual family of creatives living and working in rural, Massachusetts, in this paper I utilize an intersectional framework to make sense of how race, ethnicity, class, and gender shape artistic careers. The creative life of the family illustrates how an intersectional approach to field theory makes visible how the values and dispositions of creatives and the economic practices and opportunities available to them are shaped by intersectional identities that are themselves shaped by systemic inequalities. Most important in this analysis is the way in which an intersectional approach reveals the strategies through which creatives that have been minoritized by one or more aspects of their identity persist and thrive in their creative lives, changing the parameters of the creative fields in which they operate and the communities in which they live.

Author

• Abby Irene Templer Rodrigues, Missouri State University