Feminist futures of cultural work?

Policy makers and commentators have claimed that recent economic trends have created new opportunities in cultural work domains for a diverse group of workers (e.g. DCMS 2001; Culture North West 2006). In the digital media sector specifically, a widening recognition and valuing of worker ‘difference’ and workforce diversity as essential to creativity is seen to offer an increasingly open and attractive work domain for women workers (e.g. DTI 2005a). Nevertheless, recent statistics show that women (and others) continue to be excluded from this cultural work domain. Feminist theory can help to understand better disjunctive continuities and transformations of cultural work by opening up notions of creativity, difference, diversity and gender. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (Butler 1990, 1993), this chapter will argue that, while ostensibly supporting the opening of new opportunities for women, much of the current rhetoric around the creative industries, and women cultural workers specifically, is in fact constraining in its assumptions and implications. It further contends that the concept of ‘difference’ ¹ is the fulcrum around which discursive practices of both gender and creativity are performed and as such lies at the centre of advancing the theorization of cultural work.