Abstract
Against the backdrop of profound transformations in the technologies, economies, and politics of creative labor, legions of enterprising young women are flocking to social media platforms with aspirations of capitalizing on their passion projects. For these digitally networked content creators, fashion blogs, YouTube, and Instagram represent prospective paths to successful and rewarding careers. But to what extent do their creative investments pay off? In this talk, I draw upon in-depth interviews and fieldwork reports to show how these female digital-content producers engage in “aspirational labor,” a highly gendered, forward-looking, entrepreneurial mode of productivity. Aspirational laborers pursue creative activities that hold the promise of social and economic capital; yet the reward system for these aspirants is vastly uneven. Indeed, while a select few may realize their professional goals—namely to get paid doing what they love—this labor ideology obscures the work and capital required to compete for visibility in an attention economy. Moreover, despite the rhetoric of creative production, the aspirational labor system ensures that female participants remain suspended in the highly gendered consumption and promotion of branded commodities.
Recent Publications
Duffy, B. E. (2015). Gendering the labor of social media production. Feminist Media Studies, “Commentary and Criticism,”15(4), 710-714.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2015.1053715
Duffy, B. E. (2015). The romance of work: Gender and aspirational labour in contemporary culture industries. International Journal of Cultural Studies. Online first (ahead of print), February 25, 1-17.
http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/25/1367877915572186.full.pdf+html
Duffy, B. E. (2015). Amateur, autonomous, collaborative: Myths of aspiring female cultural producers in Web 2.0. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 32(1), 48-64.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/uVAhMpSpvBPZYtbn5xvt/full
Website