Chapter 13: Strategies for Success? Navigating Hollywood’s “Postracial” Labor Practices
-
-
Last updated
-
-
Save as PDF
-
This chapter makes a case for precarity as a historical state of being for marginalized men and women of color in the entertainment industries. As a preface to underscore what follows, I want to recount two recent experiences that make explicit the larger stakes I’m concerned with here. First, at the originating conference for this collection, a key debate focused on the gendered division of labor and how debates about “progress” often obscure the ongoing marginalization of women from the screen media workforce.
-
-
13.1: Introduction
-
Overview of the chapter goal: to make a case for precarity as a historical state of being for marginalized people of color in the entertainment industries. Includes anecdotes pointing out the ways in which women of color are often erased from conversations about labor precarity, which tend to assume all women workers are white and all male workers are racial or ethnic minorities.
-
-
13.2: Minority Employment – Dismal Data and Industrial Pushback
-
The underrepresentation of women workers and of both male and female racial minority workers in modern Hollywood productions, both above and below the line. The minimal and even reversed progress since the 1999 protests of lack of minority representation in TV. Samples of the viewpoints held by industry professionals that desire "talent" as the only hiring qualification and do not consider the underlying structures barring people of color from consideration for jobs in many cases.
-
-
13.3: Casting Directors – Precarious Limbo Gatekeepers
-
The economic precarity of most casting directors, and how this confines casting directors to sharing the ideological frames of their employers in order to avoid jeopardizing their careers.
-
-
13.4: Three Strategies of Navigating Today's Hollywood
-
Three strategies that performers and creative workers of color use to navigate their precarity of labor in today's Hollywood: blind casting, racially ambiguous performance, and universalist discourse regarding works whose cast and creative talent are predominantly of a minority group. The ways in which each strategy reinforces the current inequalities regarding race in Hollywood.
-
-
13.5: Conclusion
-
Summing up the various ways in which creative laborers of marginalized groups face and navigate precarity in the entertainment industry: structural insistance that lack of diversity only affects those with a lack of talent; the limited power of casting directors to oppose the status quo, and the strategies that individual workers may adopt to secure work even if they harm collective methods of resistance.
-
-
13.6: Notes
-