13.1: Introduction
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- Kristen J. Warner
- University of California Press
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. Scholars made resoundingly astute points about the ways women continue to suffer under the tyranny of patriarchy in the culture industries and articulated many powerful ways in which we—scholars and practitioners— might engage in the struggle for change and equality. Yet what was missing in this conversation was what is often missing from conversations about identity politics: explicitly marking out the white racial identity of the women we were discussing. I spoke up, named the exnomination, and filled in the gap. Women do not all experience precariousness and contingent labor in the same way. Some women have more access to opportunities than other women simply by virtue of their racial identity, and while all women certainly suffer under patriarchal labor regimes, some suffer less and some suffer more. My intervention in the conversation, then, was to insist on the importance of intersectional cultural analysis when discussing women and labor in the entertainment industries, and insist that any intervention we discuss must be attuned to those differences. Because in a conversation where, to crudely paraphrase Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, 1 all women laborers are assumed white and all racial or ethnic minority laborers are assumed male, we can’t begin to address the precarious creativity of women of color without first making them visible in our conceptions of screen media work.
While attending panels about working in the industry at the third annual Austin Television Festival (ATXFest), I encountered another instance when the conversation erased the specific experiences of women of color in the entertainment industries. At the festival, I listened as successful casting directors, staff writers, and showrunners shared their workaday experiences in the field. In a panel on working as an assistant, four women—three white women and one ethnically ambiguous woman—described how they each got their start in the business. Each woman had an internship that then led to permanent employment. They further explained that they garnered the necessary skills for their profession not through college but through their work as assistants or in online extension courses. Lastly, and most relevant to this essay, when asked about accessing entry-level assistant positions, each panelist agreed that leveraging existing relationships and networks was absolutely crucial to employment in the entertainment industries. Indeed, even the panelists’ own hiring practices reinforced this “truism.” They discovered new talent through alumni networks, family members, and friends. Reflecting on this panel conversation, I found precariousness to be an inevitable function of their career choice. Yet I also found that the panelists enjoyed the privilege of stabilizing some of that uncertainty for others by hiring those who reproduce their identities and social relations, and thus offsetting precarity for those who are most like them. I mention this example not only because professional networks are largely racially myopic, but also because the reproduction of identities and social relations vis-à-vis networking and mentorship directly serves a racially unjust status quo. In short, its superficial innocence masks a much more troubling reality: to assume that access to creative work simply depends first on “whom you know” and then on being “the best person for the job” ultimately obscures the power structures that systematically exclude men and women of color from availing themselves of similar opportunities for networking and jobs in the first place.
Both anecdotes reinforce a major crux of the discussion that follows. First, discursive maneuvers that reframe racially myopic professional networks and practices as an ideologically benign function of the creative industries raise the precarious stakes for laborers of color—they effectively neutralize arguments about systemic discrimination and inequality by displacing structural concerns in favor of questions about skills and talent. You’re simply good enough to get the job or you’re not. Likewise, much like my opening anecdote suggests, this discourse risks framing genuine concerns about parity and progress as the product of a contemporary moment marked by extreme precariousness for everybody rather than a function of the socio-historical circumstances of a group of workers whose precariousness has been an ever-present condition of their existence. When meaningful conversations about diversity are outside the confines of common industrial logic (that is, it’s not a problem that exists), the strategies and tactics people of color deploy to gain visibility, secure employment, and maintain careers as creative laborers deserve sustained consideration.
In this chapter, then, I first establish the stark realities of minority employment in the creative industries before outlining how industry professionals abdicate responsibility for structural problems by reframing the issue as one about skills and talent. Such discourse, I argue, is predicated upon the exnomination of its normative ideological basis. In the second section of the chapter, I draw focused attention to how this discourse affects casting for film and television roles. Here I briefly consider how casting directors reproduce normative identities (and thus limited opportunities for actors of color) in their workaday practices. I then conclude by outlining three strategies racial and ethnic minority performers have adopted to contend with their precarious circumstances, and at what cost. Ultimately, I argue that necessary and meaningful political intervention on behalf of a diverse labor force is displaced by persistent notions of “talent” and obfuscated by the simple need to find work in whatever ways possible.
My analysis draws from interviews with media professionals in industry trade journals, conference panels, social media platforms, and my own fieldwork. I borrow John Caldwell’s notion of industrial reflexivity to reframe the workaday experiences and explanations of these “insiders” as a process of self-fashioning and self-theorizing their own identities and interests within existing structures and categories. 2