O'Brien, Anne (2017) (Not) getting the credit: women, liminal subjectivity and resisting neoliberalism in documentary production. Media, Culture and Society, 40 (5). pp. 673-688. ISSN 0163-4437

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Abstract

Women experience positive engagements with documentary as an enclave that values their gendered contribution, but also suffer negative encounters with it as a genre that restricts their full involvement, by promoting masculinist practices as normative. This gendered dynamic means that women occupy a liminal space with regard to documentary. Women’s liminal status is experienced negatively in a number of ways: first, during commissioning, where their approach to narrative, budgets and directing are questioned; second, in terms of work relationships where they are required to be relentlessly ‘likeable’; and third, when credits for work performed are withheld. Women’s subjective identities are constructed around this negative liminal positioning but it can become a position or form of positive adaptation to gendered and neoliberal subjectivity in their working lives. Resistance occurs when women conduct practices such as, first, enhancing the status of affective labour; second, when they undo or reject working through normative hierarchies; and third, when they collaborate in documentary production to negate neoliberal logics of individualization. Liminality, thus, constitutes both a way of understanding women’s negative experiences of gender inequality in documentary production but also a potentially positive form of resistance to the gendered precarity that characterizes creative labour.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	documentary; gender; labour; liminality; precarity; production;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts & Humanities > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > Media Studies Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, MUSSI
Item ID:	11725
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717734405
Depositing User:	Anne O'Brien
Date Deposited:	18 Nov 2019 12:05
Journal or Publication Title:	Media, Culture and Society
Publisher:	Sage
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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