ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores how the gendered mechanisms of media work ‘gets inside’ of women workers to shape their subjectivity. Three ideal-type subjectivities were described by the cohort of respondents, they internalised an identity which was either ungendered, neoliberal or liminal. One grouping of women refused to claim that gender played any role in shaping work. They proposed that gender was of no consequence at work, they upheld the notion that they participated equally in a gender-neutral meritocracy. They denied the impact of gender inequality on their working lives, even when presented with evidence of gender disadvantages. A second form of subjectivity adopted by respondents saw gender as a form of inequality that had been overcome in the past and so proposed that women should adopt a post-feminist and neoliberal self-disciplining approach in order to comply with demanding norms of screen production work. A third group of respondents articulated a gendered sense of self that was liminal (Van Gennep, 1960), or in-between, neither fully in nor out of the industry. They self-identified as insiders on the basis of expertise but outsiders on the basis of their gender. Liminal women constantly negotiated a gender-conditional affiliation with production and their acknowledgment in credits. They frequently suffered processes of being questioned and undermined while actually doing the work as an industry ‘insider’. This duality of experience created a sense of self-identity that was liminal, a pragmatic adaptation that allowed women to simultaneously participate in media production, but to retain a distance from an industry that was biased against them. They became permanently in but not of the industry.
