ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 examines how women survive and thrive in media work, despite the biased structures and culture. Women expressed various subjectivities that either comply with how things are or which facilitate them to hold an ‘in-between’ status in screen production, which in turn can lead to them to either adapt to or seek to change the industry. Women do this by ‘de-auteuring’ production and by instead acknowledging and foregrounding their fundamental social relationality, their mutual dependencies, their valued relationships and socio-emotional connections. This positioning within the industry in effect opposes, resists and refuses the masculinist individualization so pervasive in screen production. Women workers create this change in three ways: first, by undoing industry hierarchy; second, by putting value on care and connection in their working lives; and third, by emphasizing collaboration in program production and resisting the logic of individualism or the male-genius-director/auteur tradition within the genre. Enhancing the status of care, undoing hierarchies and collaborating within their liminal status allocations in various production spaces enables alternative ways of being and different responses to the structural inequalities and the masculinist logics of threat, insecurity or precarity that are so prevalent in creative industries.
