Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work

What is it like to work as a classical musician today? How can we explain ongoing gender, racial, and class inequalities in the classical music profession? What happens when musicians become entrepreneurial and think of themselves as a product that needs to be sold and marketed? Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work explores these and other questions by drawing on innovative, empirical research on the working lives of classical musicians in Germany and the UK. Indeed, Scharff examines a range of timely issues such as the gender, racial, and class inequalities that characterise the cultural and creative industries; the ways in which entrepreneurialism - as an ethos to work on and improve the self - is lived out; and the subjective experiences of precarious work in so-called 'creative cities'. Thus, this book not only adds to our understanding of the working lives of artists and creatives, but also makes broader contributions by exploring how precarity, neoliberalism, and inequalities shape subjective experiences. Contributing to a range of contemporary debates around cultural work, Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Sociology, Gender and Cultural Studies.

Christina Scharff is Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King's College London

List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Setting the stage: the cultural and creative industries, entrepreneurialism, and the classical music profession 2 Documenting and explaining inequalities in the classical music profession 3 The silence that is not a rest: negotiating hierarchies of class, race, and gender 4 Entrepreneurialism at work: mapping the contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity 5 "Difficult, fickle, tumultuous" and yet "the best job in the world": analysing subjective experiences of precarious work 6 Structures of feeling in two creative cities: London and Berlin Conclusion: key contributions, directions for further research, and recommendations