Abstract
This chapter analyses how both aesthetic and emotional labour are presented as a vital yet ambiguous part of women’s inclusion in the contemporary creative workforce, through the examination of two US comedy dramas Shrill (2019–2021) and Mythic Quest (2020–). What is considered appropriate for women to look like, and how they are directed to manage their emotions is not without nuance when working in the cultural and creative industries (industries which often intentionally embrace informality as a way of distinguishing themselves from business-oriented practices). Navigating an environment that both profits from an individual’s authentic creative voice’ whilst also upholding specific (and often ambiguous and imprecise) expectations about what constitutes professionalism within a specific field can be complex and directly relates to multiple intersections of identity (notably the way class and race intersects with gender). This chapter will consider firstly, how the selected comedy dramas represent contemporary creative workplaces (journalism and video games design) and their gendered dynamics, and secondly, how the women protagonists’ embodied experiences of their workplaces are used within the narratives to explore current working conditions for women.
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Notes
- 1.
Brett Mills, The Sitcom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
- 2.
Madeline Lane-McKinley, Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2022), 6.
- 3.
Ibid., 9.
- 4.
UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2001: n.p.
- 5.
Rosalind Gill, “Unspeakable Inequalities: Postfeminism, Entrepreneurial Subjectivities and the Repudiation of Sexism Among Cultural Workers,” Social Politics 21, no. 4 (2014): 512.
- 6.
Anamik Saha, Race and the Cultural Industries (Bristol: Polity Press, 2017); Orian Brook, David O’Brien, and Mark Taylor (eds), Culture Is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged (Bristol: Polity Press, 2020).
- 7.
Gill, “Unspeakable Inequalities,” 519.
- 8.
Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
- 9.
Leora Eisenstadt, “Data Analytics and the Erosion of the Work/Nonwork Divide,” American Business Law Journal 56, no. 3 (Fall, 2019): 445–506.
- 10.
Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power, and Other Essays (New York: Routledge. 2018).
- 11.
Karen Boyle, #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
- 12.
Amelia Horgan, Lost in Work: Esca** Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 71.
- 13.
Gill, “Unspeakable Inequalities,” 516.
- 14.
These opportunities for exploitation are of course much more prominent in workplaces outside of the CCIs—especially those sectors that rely on zero hours contracts and low paid immigrant labour and thus replicate and exacerbate huge racialised inequalities.
- 15.
Nicola Rivers, Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- 16.
Angela McRobbie, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 45.
- 17.
Adrienne Evans, “‘The Person Inside Has Experienced the Most Change…’: The Labour of Fitness, Positivity and Narratives of Suffering,” in Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism, ed. Ellie Tomsett, Nathalie Weidhase, and Poppy Wilde (Cham: Palgrave, 2024), 29–51.
- 18.
Friedman and Laurison, The Class Ceiling, 138.
- 19.
The American version of The Office has a similar plot line where corporate incentivises each Dunder Mifflin regional office with additional holiday days if they collectively lose more weight than their colleagues in other branches within a specified timeframe.
- 20.
Barbara Plotz, Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 16.
- 21.
Layla E. E. Byers and Heidi Williams, “Hollywood’s Slim Pickings for Fat Characters: A Textual Analysis of Gilmore Girls, Sweet Magnolias, This Is Us, Shrill and Dietland,” Fat Studies 12, no. 3 (2022): 10.
- 22.
Plotz, Fat on Film, 20.
- 23.
Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill, Confidence Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).
- 24.
Ibid., 148.
- 25.
Gill, “Unspeakable Inequalities,” 516.
- 26.
Plotz, Fat on Film, 17.
- 27.
Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey, Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 7.
- 28.
Da’Shaun L. Harrison, The Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness and Anti-Blackness (Berkley: North Atlantic Books, 2021).
- 29.
For an analysis of a contemporary TV show set within a video games workplace, that deals with the concept of ‘Brogrammers’ see Eleonora Sammartino, “‘You Deserve to Be Satisfied’: Women in Tech and the Affective Reconfiguration of the Workplace Through Song in Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” in Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism, ed. Ellie Tomsett, Nathalie Weidhase, and Poppy Wilde (Cham: Palgrave, 2024), 191–212.
- 30.
Mariann Hardey, The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020).
- 31.
Amanda C. Cote and Brandon C. Harris, “‘Weekends Became Something Other People Did’: Understanding and Intervening in the Habitus of Video Game Crunch,” Convergence 27, no. 1 (2021): 161–76.
- 32.
Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37.
- 33.
Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 4.
- 34.
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 263.
- 35.
Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharff (eds), Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 35.
- 36.
McRobbie, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience.
References
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Byers, Layla E.E., and Heidi Williams. “Hollywood’s Slim Pickings for Fat Characters: A Textual Analysis of Gilmore Girls, Sweet Magnolias, This Is Us, Shrill and Dietland.” Fat Studies 12, no. 3 (2022).
Cote, Amanda C., and Brandon C. Harris. “‘Weekends Became Something Other People Did’: Understanding and Intervening in the Habitus of Video Game Crunch.” Convergence 27, no. 1 (2021): 161–76.
Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. “Creative Industries Map** Documents,” May 9, 2001. Accessed April 12, 2023. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creative-industries-map**-documents-2001.
Duffy, Brooke Erin. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
Eisenstadt, Leora. “Data Analytics and the Erosion of the Work/Nonwork Divide.” American Business Law Journal 56, no. 3 (Fall, 2019): 445–506.
Elias, Ana Sofia, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharff. Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Evans, Adrienne. “‘The Person Inside Has Experienced the Most Change…’: The Labour of Fitness, Positivity and Narratives of Suffering.” In Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism, edited by Ellie Tomsett, Nathalie Weidhase, and Poppy Wilde. pp. 29–51. Cham: Palgrave, 2024.
Friedman, Sam, and Daniel Laurison. The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged. Bristol: Polity Press, 2020.
Gill, Rosalind. “Unspeakable Inequalities: Post Feminism, Entrepreneurial Subjectivities and the Repudiation of Sexism Among Cultural Workers.” Social Politics 21, no. 4 (2014): 509–28.
Hardey, Mariann. The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020.
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Horgan, Amelia. Lost in Work: Esca** Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
Lane-McKinley, Madeline. Comedy Against Work: Utopian longing in Dystopian Times. Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2022.
McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare. Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
Mills, Brett. The Sitcom. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Nochlin, Linda. Women, Art and Power, and Other Essays. New York: Routledge, 2018.
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Orgad, Shani, and Rosalind Gill. Confidence Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Plotz, Barbara. Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Rivers, Nicola. Postfeminism[s] and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Rottenberg, Catherine. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37.
Saha, Anamik. Race and the Cultural Industries. Bristol: Polity Press, 2017.
Sammartino, Eleonora. “‘You Deserve to Be Satisfied’: Women in Tech and the Affective Reconfiguration of the Workplace Through Song in Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.” In Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism, edited by Ellie Tomsett, Nathalie Weidhase, and Poppy Wilde. pp. 191–212. Cham: Palgrave, 2024.
West, Lindy. Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman. Hatchette, 2016.
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Tomsett, E. (2024). “Millennial Dumplings” at Work: Women’s Emotional and Aesthetic Navigation of Creative Workplaces in US Comedy Drama Series Shrill and Mythic Quest. In: Tomsett, E., Weidhase, N., Wilde, P. (eds) Working Women on Screen. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49576-2_4
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