Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work

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

This is a beautifully written and compelling account of what it is like to work in the classical music profession. Written with admirable clarity and great insight, the book makes a major contribution to our understanding of gendered subjectivity in the workplace, and also to the growing field of studies of creative labour. A magnificent book that deserves to become essential reading.Rosalind Gill, Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis, City University of London, UKThis is a dazzling and important book. Meticulously researched, Scharff documents the ways in which female classical musicians experience their own professional identities and how they become 'entrepreneurial subjects'. Scharff plays close attention to the texture of inequities in this milieu, and to how competition takes specifically gendered forms. The book is a major contribution to creative economy studies, to sociology, social psychology and gender studies. Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths University of London, UKChristina Scharff’s book is a superbly thoughtful and insightful feminist study of women musicians in two contrasting cities, and it is also a major contribution to studies of creative labour. It shows how cultural workers are required to be entrepreneurs – and skilfully reveals how this contributes to workplace inequalities. David Hesmondhalgh, Professor of Media, Music and Culture, University of Leeds, UK

• List of TablesAcknowledgments Introduction 1 Setting the stage: the cultural and creative industries, entrepreneurialism, and the classical music profession2 Documenting and explaining inequalities in the classical music profession3 The silence that is not a rest: negotiating hierarchies of class, race, and gender 4 Entrepreneurialism at work: mapping the contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity5 "Difficult, fickle, tumultuous" and yet "the best job in the world": analysing subjective experiences of precarious work6 Structures of feeling in two creative cities: London and Berlin Conclusion: key contributions, directions for further research, and recommendations