ABSTRACT
Our relationship to work (or the lack of it) provides a vital reference point in the constitution of social identity, our sense of who we are. We escape from work; we escape to work; work can frame social lives or alienate. Work has also been an important site for feminist debates and campaigns over equality. Second-wave feminist writers and campaigners not only challenged discriminatory employment laws but also emphasized the ideological work of the organization of gender within capitalism which produced distinctive spaces of public/private, aligned in turn with masculine and feminine. Feminism, then, has long understood inequality as both economically exploitative and cultural or discursive, as in some way expressed and/or produced within popular culture. I’m interested here in the ways in which Hollywood movies represent work, and the ways in which contemporary popular cultural discourses about a changing workplace inform such representations. That is, I am concerned here with aspects of the cultural production of “work.”
