Bridget Conor

Gender and Creative Labour

Inequalities within the cultural and creative industries (CCI) have been insufficiently explored. International research across a range of industries reveals gendered patterns of disadvantage and exclusion which are, unsurprisingly, further complicated by divisions of class, and also disability and race and ethnicity. These persistent inequalities are amplified by the precariousness, informality and requirements for flexibility which are widely noted features of contemporary creative employment. In addition, women in particular are disadvantaged by the boundary-crossing (for instance, between home and work, paid work and unpaid work) and new pressures around identity-making and self-presentation, as well as continuing difficulties related to sexism and the need to manage parenting responsibilities alongside earning. This article introduces a new collection which explores these issues, marking the significance of gender for an understanding of creative labour in the neoliberal economy.

Gurus and Oscar Winners: How-To Screenwriting Manuals in the New Cultural Economy

Screenwriting has been the subject of extensive literature in the past three decades in relation to both the techniques of the trade and the pursuit of profit and fame. This article demonstrates that how-to screenwriting manuals both feed into and exemplify the new cultural economy and the position(s) of creative labor within that economy by offering the opportunity to dream up and invent one’s own career and providing blueprints for doing so. The article draws on a critical discourse analysis study of a selection of the most popular manuals and analyzes the discursive strategies the texts deploy to concretize aspects of screenwriting labor, from story structure and formatting to pitching and rewriting. The manuals are discussed as a type of psy-technology and as a sophisticated form of professional self-help, and they are also analyzed as precarious governmental tools that shape industries, practices, and subjects but in ambiguous and chaotic ways.

‘Egotist’, ‘masochist’, ‘supplicant’: Charlie and Donald Kaufman and the gendered screenwriter as creative worker

This article offers a gendered reading of the screenwriter as creative worker in the context of the unequal socio-economy of screenwriting work. A number of ideal subject positions for the screenwriter are evoked in screenwriting manuals, pedagogies and representations of writers themselves, in particular, the ‘egotist’, the ‘masochist’ and the ‘supplicant’. These subjects are masculine in orientation although rarely acknowledged in gendered terms. The article draws on findings from a three-year study of British screenwriters but for the purposes of this volume, focuses on on-screen portrayals of screenwriting work. In particular, the analysis looks at the film Adaptation (2002) and the ways in which the film and its characters embody these subject positions. Not only are these ideal types circulated and recirculated in discourse about screenwriting as creative work but they are constitutive of screenwriting as a profession and a representative sphere.

Screenwriting, higher education and digital ecologies of expertise

ABSTRACT In this paper, we examine screenwriting and higher education in terms of emergent, digital ‘ecologies of screenwriting expertise’. Established forms of screenwriting guidance and instruction, such as ‘how-to’ guides and higher education academic-practitioners , now sit alongside new, digital and networked sites for screenwriting education such as Lynda.com and The Blacklist 3.0. Examining Lynda.com, the online learning platform, and The Blacklist, a fee-based professional script reader service, we argue for the need to address the teaching of screenwriting both inside and outside higher education. Bound into ‘ecologies of screenwriting expertise’ are complex and overlapping questions concerning how professional boundaries are policed, about who has or claims to have industry access, and about how and where efforts are made to ensure that aspiring writers are supported with relevant insights and advice. Across our examples, we argue that expert biographies and profiles are created and operationalised with varying levels of visibility which correspond with authority and legitimacy, especially from the perspective of those aspirants and amateurs who are paying to use these sites and spaces.