Abstract
In the performing arts, discrimination is a widely recognized issue occurring in relation to multiple social divisions. Through a qualitative analysis of personal stories of discrimination, we investigate the relationship between intersectional categories emerging in the telling and orientation of performing artists. Discrimination is tied to gatekeeping practices that are of varying significance to the artists depending on the power relationships between the parties concerned and the precariousness of the artists’ positions. Recognizing such experiences as discrimination requires an awareness of category relationships that can be implicit, explicit, or intrinsic. A sensitivity to these category relationships and the ways in which stories are constructed has important implications for promoting social justice among freelancers.
Introduction
Working in the cultural sector is precarious with short-term contracts, self-employment, and freelance work (see e.g. Naclerio, 2023), compelling the continuous acquisition of skills to ensure employability and financial sustainability (Bennett, 2009: 311, 323–324; Ross, 2008: 25, 31–49), since success and acknowledgement in the field provide no guarantees (Naclerio, 2023). Also, while unpaid labour is common in the cultural sector, experiences and attitudes towards it are largely related to class and its affordances (Brook et al., 2020). Despite their precariousness, cultural sector careers are much desired, with high levels of job satisfaction compared to other sectors (Steiner and Schneider, 2013: 240, 242).
The precarious creative field is marked by high competitiveness and an ethos and discourse of ambitious and passionate work (Naclerio, 2023). Together with an entrepreneurial ethos, these features may make it difficult to come forward with personal experiences of injustice or mistreatment even if one is aware of inequalities in the field, leading to critical awareness without experienced possibilities to change things (cf. Naclerio, 2023: 149). Cultural workers are presumed to be able to devote all their time to their passionate labour and to take full responsibility for the risks inherent in precarious cultural work – to practise entrepreneurial subjectivity (Gill, 2014: 516). However, one’s employment situation affects possibilities for agency (Haapakorpi et al., 2022).
Practices of cultural gatekeeping can play a key role in achieving an equitable distribution of career prospects and financial resources for actors in a field (Barrios and Villarroya, 2022: 987; Hillenbrand et al., 2015; Keere, 2022). Cultural fields are competitive arenas where gatekeepers possess the power to include or exclude potential employees, thus controlling access to the field (e.g. Keere, 2022) and impacting careers (Hamann and Beljean, 2021: 44). Cultural sociological studies have investigated the strategies that gatekeepers use in their decision-making when categorizing candidates. These strategies include, for instance, typecasting (Zuckerman et al., 2003) and comparison (Hamann and Beljean, 2021), which vary across sectors within a field. As Keere (2022: 86) concludes, when a sector is ‘characterized by the absence of clear criteria and by ambiguity in procedures, decisions happen more individually, habitus-based, and ad hoc’. Since social inclusion and exclusion strongly rely on symbolic self-presentation, status signalling, and group membership (Bourdieu, 1984; Lamont et al., 2014), habitus-based gatekeeping decisions readily afford opportunities for discrimination (Tatli and Özbilgin, 2012). Yet, through their art, performing artists among others have raised critical discussions about the need of art institutions to reflect on racism and sexism in their activities (e.g. Price, 2019).
The possibility to account for negative experiences is key to raising people’s awareness of cultural sector complexities. While research indicates that people both acknowledge and normalize their discriminatory experiences (Varjonen et al., 2016), very little is known about the detailed practices of constructing such accounts, with the social divisions involved. Understanding the dynamics of these accounts in interactional encounters is key to understanding when and how they may enable social change, thereby counteracting the negative effects of discrimination, and why they are often devoid of such effects. In our research, we seek to elucidate this phenomenon.
Through our conceptual framework of intersectionality in narration, we will analyse the performance artists’ stories of discrimination and their responses to discriminatory categorizations using ethnomethodological methods. This analysis highlights the prerequisites for telling stories of discrimination and examines how intersectionality influences the recognizability of discrimination. We begin by presenting the emergence of discrimination in the cultural sector in relation to various social axes.
Discrimination in the Performing Arts and the Cultural Sector
Discrimination in the performing arts and the cultural sector is a familiar phenomenon. Cultural gatekeeping practices habitually impose standards inhibiting the recognition and representation of the contributions of specific groups of artists. However, a study on gatekeeping in higher education institutions and job placement organizations states that gatekeepers resist the idea that the cultural sector excludes candidates from certain backgrounds (Tatli and Özbilgin, 2012). Such gatekeepers typically belong to privileged groups themselves (e.g. white, middle class), they advocate meritocracy and presume neutrality in their decisions, thereby legitimizing inequalities while escaping scrutiny beneath the surface (Tatli and Özbilgin, 2012). Discrimination has been shown to occur across various social divisions, particularly in relation to gender, sexuality, race and age.
Regarding gender, labour market conditions in the cultural sector seem to disadvantage women, who are underrepresented in the workforce (Joseph, 2018), notably in key creative roles and leadership positions (TBR, 2008). Women are also more typically employed on part-time and temporary contracts (UNESCO, 2017) with poorer working conditions, wages and career opportunities (Carreño and Villarroya, 2022; Coulangeon et al., 2005; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2015). Reportedly, the characteristics of many professions in the culture sector, including project-based entrepreneurial work, low and unstable income, and the importance of networking in informal staffing, are linked to gender inequalities (e.g. Banks and Milestone, 2011; Barrios and Villarroya, 2022; Kleppe and Røyseng, 2016). Women are also known to struggle to reconcile family and career; in entrepreneurial work, women often bear the economic costs of parenting (Jones and Pringle, 2015).
In addition to this traditional structural sexism, women in contemporary cultural fields face tacit sexism that is not easily tackled through policies (Jones and Pringle, 2015). In the film industry, the belief in meritocracy hides how women’s contributions are less likely to be recognized (Jones and Pringle, 2015: 37), since associations of masculinity with creativity and the ‘ideal performer’ are prevalent (Miller, 2016; Scharff, 2020).
Especially in the performing arts, women are more exposed than men to sexual harassment and are more so than women in other professions (Kleppe and Røyseng, 2016). As the individual professional’s body is their main tool, boundaries between private and occupational bodies may become blurred, normalizing physical contact and sexual transgression (Svensson, 2020: 10).
Regarding sexuality, the image of masculinity evinced in the performing arts is frequently white, cis-gendered and heteronormative (Norman and Bryans, 2020). While the performing arts are frequently deemed ‘gay friendly’ (Clum, 2000), Rumens and Broomfield (2014) emphasize that dismantling heteronormative structures should not be taken for granted in this context either and that gay men are also compelled to constantly negotiate their position in the industry. The strategies used are partly dependent on whom they encounter in various performance arenas. For example, cast members may construct gay men as more limited than heterosexual male performers as regards playing different male parts, and they are also to be mindful of the audience’s frequently heteronormative feelings about homosexuality (Rumens and Broomfield, 2014).
Race is associated with discrimination in the cultural sector (e.g. Ali and Byrne 2022; Friedman and O’Brien 2017), a case in point being classical art music and its near-exclusive commitment to music by white, male, European and American composers (Nettl, 1995: 110) as well as the strict distinction between classical music and other genres deemed less cultivated (Kajikawa et al., 2019: 160–161). The privileged status of western classical music is inherent in music education, reinforced by colourblind language enabling it to evade all scrutiny and challenge (Fiske, 1994: 42). The built-in culture of exclusion has been particularly prominent in university music schools, distinguishing European art music from the music of darker-skinned, lower-class Americans (Kajikawa et al., 2019: 158).
Finally, the performing arts are also permeated by ageism, being the ‘prejudice by one age group towards another’ (Butler, 1969: 243). Although frequently associated with contempt for the elderly, ageism manifests in a wide range of circumstances affecting all people, young or old (Bytheway, 1995: 1). In the performing arts, ageism has been addressed by dance scholars, demonstrating its prevalence in western dance culture (e.g. Edward, 2018; Schweiger, 2012; York-Pryce, 2019). For example, Schweiger (2012: x) has criticized the stigmatizing ways in which the experiences of ageing and retirement among professional dancers are commonly represented. As dancers over the age of 40 years transition to parts entailing little or no dancing, they experience being reduced in rank (York-Pryce, 2019: 5–6).
Many social divisions overlap, likewise their susceptibilities to discrimination. For example, gender-based discrimination in the cultural sector has been observed to intersect with age. Young women are generally harassed more (Anttila, 2019), but older professionals also experience discrimination. In the performing arts, women’s careers tend to be short due to age, as they are considered less attractive when ageing (e.g. Kleppe and Røyseng, 2016; Svensson, 2020). In addition to age, the invisibility of women’s artistic creations has been shown to be more profound when gender interacts with other social divisions, such as those based on race, ethnic origin, economic status, language, religion, beliefs, or political opinions (Villarroya and Barrios, 2022). The need to analyse such overlapping and intersecting social divisions has led to the emergence of the notion of ‘intersectionality’, addressed next.
Intersectionality and the Analysis of Narratives
Discrimination is experienced in a complex set of relationships of our social positionings. Cultural conventions regarding those social positionings may also affect whose experiences are considered valid (see Olakivi et al., 2024). Through the concept of intersectionality, feminist scholars have addressed multiple social differences co-producing inequalities, and intersectionality has become a major paradigm (e.g. Crenshaw, 1991; de los Reyes and Mulinari, 2005; Lykke, 2005; McCall, 2005) frequently perceived as an analytic sensibility (Collins, 2015) with many methodological approaches to analysing discrimination. Promoting social justice and transformation as well as addressing power are central to intersectional research (Rice et al., 2019). Intersectionality directs attention to structural features as in material realities, political as in invisibility of experiences, and representational as socio-cultural derogation of marginalized groups or subjects (Crenshaw, 1991).
Intersectionality is constantly reworked and corrected (Ilmonen, 2020: 357–358), with concern regarding alienation from the empowering aims of US Black feminist theory (Byrne, 2015; Davis and Zarkov, 2017: 2), and appropriation of the term by white feminists has been feared to cost the political power of the concept (Ilmonen, 2020: 357–358); yet, importing Anglo-American concepts may run the risk of intellectual self-colonization in local contexts (Thorpe and Inglis, 2022: 335–336). Black feminist activism has been important in understanding how the power relations evoked by dominant social categories are always present, albeit implicitly (Ilmonen, 2020: 354–355; see also Levine-Rasky, 2011: 243). This seems noteworthy in Finland as part of the Nordic context, where the discourse of Nordic exceptionalism has hidden colonialism, and discussions on racism have overlooked national racialized minorities such as the Sámi and the Roma (Rastas, 2019: 358–360, 374). However, diversification of the population calls attention to the experiences of racialized minorities and addressing whiteness as a racialized category (Rastas and Poelman, 2021).
By following a social constructionist approach to intersectionality that pinpoints the relations between categories (Staunæs, 2003: 105), we investigate discrimination stories of performing artists. In our analysis, we cannot access the whole spectrum of identifications but only those brought to the fore and oriented to by the narrators. In debates on intersectionality, relevant social categories and their levels of analysis are often problematized (Ilmonen, 2020: 361; McCall, 2005). Intersectional categories, inseparable on the subject level but nevertheless analysable, function on both structural and identity levels in particular ways because of their ontological bases and functional logics in society (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 195).
Ethnomethodologically informed interaction research has approached intersectionality by analysing, for example, common-sense understandings around race and class and how these understandings are deployed and understood as being shared (Whitehead, 2013). In his analysis, Kevin Whitehead reminds us that the orientation to and deployment of what is seen as common sense reinforces the relevance of the intersectional relations of categories, without openly discussing such understandings (Whitehead, 2013). Our approach comes close to that of Catho Jacobs et al. (2022), who have focused on stereotypes associated with intersectional categories and analysed how interviewees made sense of discrimination through their own categorizing work that tended towards nuancing intersectional groups by categorizing them further, especially when these were localized. We are also interested in local contextual categorizing practices and how social categories are oriented to in both the storyworld and in making a case of discrimination. As suggested, to understand power practices such as exclusion, it is worthwhile investigating how intersections emerge and become visible and under what conditions (Davis and Zarkov, 2017: 4).
Our research is based on analysing storytelling in a research interview context with interactional rules and social relationships different from those of ordinary conversation (De Fina, 2009: 237). Such stories are dependent upon both the research agenda and the activities of the participants (Helsig, 2010: 275, 290). The shaping of the stories reveals interviewees’ orientations to the interviewer’s question, including the negotiation of tellability (De Fina, 2009: 240, 246). The study of how intersectionality emerges in interview interactions has been found to be a fruitful approach potentially revealing both topics difficult to discern in the analysis of everyday interaction and the multilayered complexity of intersecting social categories (Jacobs et al., 2022: 122–123). Unpacking such complexities in storying discrimination allows for developing ways to tackle social injustice.
Research Questions
We examine experiences of discrimination in the performing arts, as accounted for in the context of artists’ interviews. Our analysis is guided by the following two research questions:
RQ1: How do intersectional categories become relevant in the interviewees’ accounts, and how do these categories serve the construction of discrimination?
RQ2: How do the interviewees respond to the discriminatory categorizations and gatekeeping practices in the storyworld?
Data and Method
The analysed dataset consists of interviews with freelance performing artists (N = 10) collected during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–2021 in Finland. They were identified as a vulnerable group, and the interviews were conducted as part of a larger project on cultural events and workers affected by the pandemic, aiming to understand how they were coping and how they perceived their position. An additional focus was to determine whether the pandemic had increased negative experiences, such as discrimination, related to work. The shutdown of most of the activities in the performing arts had severe effects on the freelancers who had to find ways to cope with the loss of employment and while applying their skills in managing uncertainty (Haapakorpi et al., 2022). Intensified experiences of exclusion contributed to stagnation, which some could overcome by shifting their focus to the future (Haapakorpi et al., 2022). Given the sensitive position of freelancers, empathy, care, respect and understanding were important tools for conducting interviews ethically (see Shaw et al., 2020). The Covid-19-related restrictions and concerns for health impacted all our lives, and the precariousness of academic life experienced by the interviewing researcher created a mutual ground and sense of solidarity during the interviews.
Interviewees were recruited by advertising the possibility via relevant unions and associations, through personal networks, and by contacting people from various fields of performing arts based on internet searches. Those who agreed to be interviewed represented dance, theatre, music, or circus and often worked under many professional titles. The majority of the interviewees were women and white, and their ages varied from approximately 30 to 60 years. Even though one of the interviewees had recently finished their studies, all had years or even decades of experience in various artistic projects. None had permanent employment; they were dependent on gigs, projects, and scholarships for their livelihood, and some had partners with their own income. All interviewees gave their consent based on the information given in advance regarding the research purposes and data protection (EU GDPR).
Semi-structured thematic interviews addressed career, situation and livelihood during the pandemic and views and experiences of equality and discrimination. Uncertainties and rapidly changing restrictions were commonly addressed by the interviewees.
When asked about their experiences of discrimination, interviewees sometimes responded in general terms rather than providing a direct personal account. They might refer to other negative behaviours (e.g. avoidance of handling difficult issues in artist communities), treat discrimination as an issue affecting others more than themselves, or find it challenging to recognize the issue. This question was typically placed later in the interview due to its delicate nature. Interviewees could also raise the issue without a preceding question, allowing for an opportunity to discuss it further. Sometimes, discrimination was reported as uncommon because some interviewees occupied a particular niche based on special skills or circumstances that led them to areas with less competition.
The interviews were conducted by one of the authors, providing a good preliminary understanding of the affordances of the data. In the first round, we looked for descriptions of discriminative phenomena in the cultural sector. For the most part, these were discussed as structural dilemmas that characterized the whole field and indicated many common features for freelancers across artistic branches, such as weak terms of work, flaws in the funding of artistic work, and side effects of competition. This is not surprising since – in addition to similarities in labour market and funding conditions – different performing art branches interact in different projects, and it was common that the interviewees had worked in several areas of (performing) arts. Structural problems and inequalities were not seen as particularly related to the pandemic but mostly as long-standing issues.
For the next round of analysis, we selected cases of discriminatory experiences based on the following criteria: descriptions of discrimination should be
• related to work and careers to locate problems in the cultural sector;
• personal experiences;
• recognizable as stories with temporally ordered reported events (Labov and Waletzky, 1967);
• including reported speech typical of complaint stories and offering insight into the criticizable persons or issues in the story (Heinrichsmeier, 2021; Svahn, 2017), and
• revealing interviewee orientations to social categories in discrimination.
Applying these criteria resulted in the three cases presented here. As the analysis will show, the motivation for telling stories about discrimination can vary widely, not solely in response to a direct interview question on the matter. The first case concerns age discrimination fundamentally affecting a circus performer’s income, position and work arrangements. The narration also topicalizes gender. In the second case, a stage performer describes discrimination foregrounding the relations of gender and sexuality in such a way which, although initially creating obstacles to his access to an artistic career, are not insuperable. The last case illustrates the intrinsic relationship between racism and art form in a discrimination story by a musician. References to specific places, titles and other personal details have been changed to protect the anonymity of the interviewees.
Storytelling is a situated practice that is central to constructing the self (Heinrichsmeier, 2021: 44), and understanding the situatedness of identity is part of the project of intersectionality (Rice et al., 2019: 418). Ethnomethodology fits this aim well as an approach interested in people’s own sensemaking procedures and the intersubjectivity of those understandings (see Heritage, 1984). We draw on the conversation analytic tradition by focusing on the interactants’ orientations and the recipient-design of their turns (Sacks et al., 1974) while membership categorization analysis (MCA) enables a focus on categorial rather than sequential issues in interaction (Speer and Stokoe, 2011; Stokoe, 2012: 278). However, our focus is not so much on a particular category in itself (cf. Stokoe, 2012: 280) but on the emergence of category relationships. Common-sense understandings related to categorizations highlight the complainability of what is being told (Schegloff, 2005). Following the MCA tradition, our research is a case study of a particular setting (see Stokoe, 2012) on how categorizations are built and resisted (Stokoe, 2012: 280), in other words, how, in storytelling, categories are used in relation to each other to highlight situations of discrimination. The interview context is rhetorically complex and entwined with accomplishing interactional tasks (Abell et al., 2000: 191). The analytical approach comes close to a branch of narrative analysis that is also conversation analytically informed and pays attention to the recipient-design of storytelling in interviews (e.g. De Fina, 2009; see also Jacobs et al., 2022).
Our methodology provided us with several tools for analysis: Accounts of discrimination often involve sensitive and affective narration, the expression of which is considered analysable through interactional research methods – especially in the context of storytelling, where affect appears in a multifaceted manner verbally, vocally and visually (Selting, 2010). In addition to openly expressing emotional orientation towards reported behaviour (e.g. Drew, 1998), narrators can employ various lexical and prosodic features to implicitly emphasize the significance of the reported behaviour, such as reported speech (Couper-Kuhlen and Klewitz, 1999; Selting, 2010), reported thoughts (Haakana, 2007), extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986) and crude language (Rääbis et al., 2019). Expressions of emotion in narration often focus on the climax of the story, where the emotional intensity of the narrative is typically highest (Selting, 2017), while reported speech is frequently used as a routine method to highlight and authenticate significant aspects of the narrative (e.g. Buttny, 1998; Holt and Clift, 2007).
Furthermore, we investigated the means of storytelling and interaction through which the narrators described their agency or passivity in situations of discrimination and afterwards. Personal storytelling has proven to be a significant tool for constructing agency, as it not only provides an opportunity to narrate events but also enables the depiction of whose agency was involved and to what extent, along with possible changes in agency (Bamberg, 2011; see also Weiste et al., 2022). For instance, the linguistic choices indicating certain roles, such as action verbs and referential expressions (Schiffrin, 1996), and the formation of new identities within the storyworld are concrete ways in which various forms of and potential changes in agency can be attributed in personal narratives. Additionally, for example, reported speech is considered a resource for self-positioning, either as a strong actor or as passive and incapacitated, depending on whether one animates oneself to speak in the narrative or not (Heinrichsmeier, 2021).
Analysis
Here, we analyse accounts of experiences of discrimination provided by performing artists in the context of research interviews. The three analysed stories differ in how intersectionality emerges, varying from implicit to explicit and overlapping to a greater or lesser extent.
We examine how the interviewees invoke these categories, seeking to construct their accounts as instances of ‘discrimination’ (RQ1). The cases are also related to gatekeeping attempts regarding the normative and the purity of the art form. The cases are organized with reference to the interviewees’ ways of responding to the discriminatory categorizations (RQ2), varying in the possibility and the need to resist categorization. These three ways of responding are labelled: empowerment, discordance and non-perturbance. All data extracts are translations from Finnish into English.
Empowerment: Implicit Category Relationships with Localized Gatekeeping Practices
In the first case, experiencing discrimination is described as a catalyst of the interviewee’s decision to become a solo artist. In this sense, her story is one of empowerment. The story about discrimination is produced in direct response to a question. As the analysis will show, negative categorization is difficult to resist. However, by localizing and restricting the gatekeeping practices present in the story, the narrator can reduce the face threat. Intersectionality in discrimination is characterized by implicit category relationships.
After a discussion on how the circus performer books gigs and promotes her work, the interviewer’s question about how she decided to become a solo artist prompts an account of a hero’s journey through discrimination and self-doubt to instant success. The interviewer’s question is reformulated halfway through from how did you end up (drifting) to how did you make the choice that you want a solo career (choosing from options, active agency). The beginning of the answer (l. 3) includes hedging with a pause, nervous laughter, and restarts, foreshadowing the delicate and face-threatening nature of the account. She mentions the group wherein she was not only a member but also somebody performing many functions, thus presenting herself as a good and invested member. The incident itself is briefly described as notice from a prospective employer that she is too old (ll. 7–12). By contrast, the effects of the subsequent experience of age discrimination are produced affectively with extreme case formulations reflecting the powerlessness and rage the narrator experiences faced with the discriminatory categorization ‘old’: there’s nothing I can do about it myself (l. 22). Her transformation from a group performer into a solo artist is a painful process entailing a leap into the unknown: I’d never thought of a solo career (l. 28). However, in the story, an idea of a solo stage name appears as something she considered and presented as a joke that becomes reality when she consults her partner about adopting the title Madame Serpent (ll. 29–34). With the seeds of a possible solo career sown, empowered by her anger – bloody hell, let’s see what happens – she puts up a website, starts to market her performances, and soon manages to book gigs (ll. 36–39).
In the story, both age and gender are explicated as relevant but separate categories, their relationship in discrimination remaining implicit. Age is foregrounded as a basis for discrimination. Gender is expressed when the artist describes coming up with inventing her feminine and prestigious stage name (l. 30). Her hesitations about choosing this feminine title serve to indicate the sensitivity of the issue by framing it as a joke and explaining how she sought confirmation from her partner when making the decision. At the end, the artist states that this was the only instance where she had encountered ageism.
In the story, the interviewee responds to discriminatory categorizations and gatekeeping practices in a way that negotiates the loss of agency and power and marks this as temporary. Making the change highlights her personal active process. Being categorized as old is something that the teller cannot resist either in the storyworld or outside it (ll. 20–22). This inability to resist categorization is central to answering the interviewer’s question and telling a story of empowerment in which discrimination is a catalyst for change. This necessity for change came unexpectedly, since before in the group everything was quite nice. The situation of being discriminated against is presented as a matter of fact and distanced from the self: getting notice from the potential employer, using an altered voice marking reported speech, and using a third-person reference instead of referring to herself directly. Even the discriminator is described with a passive form: not as somebody who says or tells but a body from whom a notice is gotten (ll. 11–12). In addition, the categorization ‘old’ is bound to a specific context: too old for this place. Thus, gatekeeping is restricted to a specific place and pertains to local normative conceptions of a suitable (female) performer. Even if the interviewee has suffered from the discrimination, she has emerged from the experience as an empowered actor.
Discordance: Explicit Category Relationships with Normativizing Gatekeeping Practices
In the second case, the story is not a response to a direct question prior to the recounting but a contribution to a more general discussion on uncertainties inherent in the field of the performing arts. Although the artist has built a career despite discrimination, he remains unsure of how others perceive him. Thus, his story is one of discordance.
Using multiple intersecting categories with explicit category relationships is necessary to frame the negative experience as discrimination and present the gatekeeping practices of the art form as unjustified. Passivity in relation to discriminatory behaviour is a characteristic of the narration: although the narrator partly rejects stereotyping discriminatory categorizations, the gatekeeping practices in the story shape his agency both in the story and in relation to his career.
Unlike the first case, the story is not produced in direct response to a question but after discussing how careers have become more precarious. The interviewer has just mentioned the need to be aware of various uncertainties. The stage artist formulates the forthcoming story as part of an earlier discussion on his positions during his career (l. 2) then reverts to what affects becoming employed. The story is tellable as it – although sensitive and traumatic – is an issue the stage artist has worked on (l. 3) but which also occasionally returns to haunt him (ll. 4–5).
In the story itself, troublesomeness is highlighted in several ways, and it is clearly linked to the gatekeepers’ multilayered social categorizations in contrast to the first case: the interviewee is put up against an all-male homogenous jury described as professionals with long careers, implying both power but also certain gendered expectations. In this three-against-one scenario, the jury’s commitment to evaluating becomes questionable as they reportedly look through their papers and appear bored. In the reported direct interaction between applicant and jury, they also engage in redundant activities, such as asking superfluous questions.
The discriminatory punchline is delivered as reported speech (ll. 9–17) forcing the interviewee to repeat his unsuccessfulness in former application rounds in the manner reminiscent of a trial. The interviewee is invited to join the jury’s conclusion when presented with the evidence (ll. 14–17). The jury describes the applicant as too feminine to get work in the field, thus contriving to legitimize their decision as an employability issue. Understanding the reference as discrimination related to sexual orientation is later confirmed in the stage performer’s talk when he states being open about his orientation and how significant numbers of his employers belong to sexual and gender minorities.
The jury continues discourteously, admonishing and advising against future applications (ll. 21–24). The interviewee does not comply but perseveres and is able to engage in a career as a performing artist (ll. 25–33). Yet the discrimination experienced left him questioning the perception others have of him (ll. 33–34).
Multiple categorizations are necessary for the stage performer’s story to count as blatant discrimination. Categorizations of the jury imply the power relationships in the described application situation, initially putting the applicant at a disadvantage and predicting probable if not unavoidable discrimination. The interviewee is mostly a witness, whose actions are almost irrelevant. The interconnected problematic category relationships between gender and sexuality illustrate the mismatch between the stage performer’s self-image and others’ perceptions of him, exemplifying the potential uncertainties of a career in the performing arts.
The gatekeeping function of discrimination is constructed as very prominent and suggested to pertain to what is deemed acceptable in that particular art form. The tacit assumption is that heteronormative masculinity is the ideal. Although the interviewee denounces femininity as detrimental to his performance, heteronormativity may still have been instrumental in the career he has forged. Thus, the story also fits the general discussions on the uncertainties of employment discussed earlier in the interview. The interviewee’s self-reflection and decision to persevere with a career in the performing arts also marks a shift from passive bystander to active agent.
Non-perturbance: Intrinsic Category Relationships with Normativizing Gatekeeping Practices
In the third case, experienced discrimination emerges in response to an interview question and is described as exceptional in the specific artistic circles. Since the narrator’s art is embedded in her social background and the perpetrator’s power in gatekeeping the art form is low, there is no need to resist categorization as such. Thus, this is a story of non-perturbance, where passivity in relation to discriminatory behaviour is possible without compromising agency and power. Given the intrinsic nature of category relationships, intersectionality in the discrimination story and its tellability as discrimination are inevitable.
The story is prompted by an earlier question of whether the musician has experienced unequal treatment or discrimination. Recalling and accounting an incidence of racism is thus consistent with expectations in an interview context (as an appropriate answer to a question). The interactants negotiate the proper context to be the work environment, and the musician tells how she successfully used her ethnic minority background as a special feature in professional education and in shaping her career. She encounters racism in everyday life where she lives but not in artistic or musical circles. This is due to variation in the backgrounds of people working in the music industry.
The musician describes a single racist comment from the artistic circles, the context which she presents jokingly (ll. 1–2). The circumstances are reportedly exceptional (a party, the perpetrator quite drunk). Another musician 1 starts not only to describe but to rant (l. 4) about the superiority of classical music to the folk music that is the basis of the interviewee’s art (ll. 6–7). Her musical genre is described pejoratively (l. 7). The exceptionality of the incident is further highlighted by the storyteller’s description of how other musicians present tried to protest the comment (ll. 9–10). The storyteller considers that although drunk, the other person has spoken plainly (in line 11 the storyteller twists the form of an old saying to include inebriation: out of the mouths of boozy babes). The interviewer further elicits information by asking how the narrator responded (l. 13), but she cannot recall and deems it pointless in any case (ll. 14, 16–17). The story ends with her account as a person disinclined to activism (ll. 17–18, 20). Thereafter, the interviewer shifts to another topic with a new question.
Since the musician’s story is a direct response to an interview question, categorization is intrinsic to relevance of the story as discrimination. She marks the perpetrator’s comment as racist (l. 2), thereby indicating how to understand the coming story. In the story, the perpetrator has commented negatively on the interviewee’s music (ll. 6–7). Besides describing the genre as something simple and repetitive, in using the phrase your humdrum, the perpetrator also typifies it as representing a certain group. Here, the devaluation of an art form and racism are inseparable.
As in the two other cases, the interviewee is passive in the face of discriminatory categorization. In the story, she does not react, while others do. The narrator recalls the incident and comments that her personality, not easily provoked, contributes to her passivity (ll. 15,17–19, 21). This accounting is prompted by the interviewer asking if she responded to the racist comment (l. 13).
The third case differs from the other two in that the gatekeeping function of discrimination is very low. In an informal setting, the pretty drunk discriminator is not described as influential in the musician’s access to resources such as work or educational opportunities. Their expertise is in another musical genre. Defining the normative in the artform is thus narrow, as the sole benchmarking reference is classical music. However, given her description of everyday commonplace racism and earlier in the interview being categorized based on her background, she presumably has to negotiate her responses to such situations and how to position herself as regards ethnic categorization or racism.
Conclusions
In considering how intersectional categories became relevant in the interviewees’ accounts and how the categories enabled the construction of discrimination, both the interview context and the category relationships were demonstrably important. Applying an intersectionality perspective contributes to both the analysis and implications for social justice in the cultural sector: recognizing connections between social categories that make up discrimination and how likely it becomes in the storyworld. In the empowerment case, categorizations are part of answering a question on career change. Age and gender are oriented to in the story, but their relationship remains implicit although arguably, as age is not presented as affecting the circus artist’s skills, there may well be a gendered connotation in the story. The category ‘old’ is handled as unchangeable and a catalyst of change, whereas gender is more a vehicle for change, an explicit part of the artist’s performance persona. In the discordance case, multilayered intersecting categories are made explicit and used to describe the power relationships in the story and how self-perception becomes challenged. The categories of gender and sexuality are applied to construct the experience as discrimination. The powerful jury practises indirect heteronormativity, making it harder to be addressed in the storyworld while remaining recognizable through the narration. In the non-perturbance case, the story is a response to an interview question on discrimination, making categorization an integral part of responding. The category relationships are intrinsic in that ridiculing the interviewee’s musical genre is tantamount to devaluing her non-white background. In their assessment of the superiority of classical music compared to folk music, the perpetrator deploys whiteness.
Looking at the category relationships through the orientations of the interviewees reveals the different ways relationships emerge and how they are understood to be shared in the interview situation, being a reminder of the sensitivity and awareness needed both in interview situations and in different types of data analyses. These relationships may remain vague, as Jacobs et al. (2022) note, and their explicitness, as we have shown, varies widely. Recognizing discrimination as intersectional requires a shared understanding of the dynamics of social categories, especially in unrequested stories of discrimination.
Without the intersectionality lens, whiteness would be left unrecognized as an issue. Only the ageism case of the white woman could clearly be identifiable as discrimination, as it is constructed straightforwardly. Also, the primacy of white culture would remain hidden in the non-perturbance case because the style of music and the artist’s social background completely overlap. Both the discordance and non-perturbance cases would highlight aesthetic and taste as grounds for differential treatment instead of discrimination. Understanding social category relationships upgrades the seriousness of what is told and makes it worthwhile to ask questions about the normativities and representations in gatekeeping processes from the viewpoint of promoting social justice.
The interviewees’ responses to the discriminatory categorizations reflected their position in the cultural sector, and all the interviewees seemed virtually to be bystanders in the discrimination incidents. Discrimination was beyond their control. In the empowerment case, strong affective reactions marked this experience of ageism as a divider in the artist’s personal process. In the storyworld, she soon displays very strong agency by building a quickly successful career as a soloist after embracing her identity of a no-longer-young female performer. Social categories may provide both benefits and disadvantages at different points of narration. In the discordance case, ‘being feminine’ is oriented to as assigning the interviewee to a sexual minority with a derogatory evaluation of the effects on his performance. By overcoming this devaluation, the interviewee is able to build a career in his cultural field through perseverance and belief in himself. Heteronormative structures in the performing arts (e.g. Norman and Bryans, 2020; Rumens and Broomfield, 2014) affect careers, and awareness of them may support contextualizing one’s experience. This seems a worthwhile effort, since, as the discordance case shows, the experience nevertheless transcends the boundaries of the story as affecting the self even years later. In the non-perturbance case, the passivity of the interviewee in relation to the offender in the story is reported in a different tone, as the offender has no power to affect her circumstances. As such, her agency in the situation is ambivalent; by not reacting, she does not oppose the discriminatory behaviour. The basis of her art is very much in her ethnic background and is not something that she needs to struggle with.
Freelance cultural sector workers are heavily dependent upon personal networks and skills to create sustainable careers. Discriminatory gatekeeping practices may have severe consequences for one’s livelihood and sense of self. In two cases in our data, unjust gatekeeping decisions resulted in tangible effects, such as the loss of earnings or denial of access to education for the artists. The commitment to preserve the selected artistic genre meant these artists had to renegotiate their career plans. Despite experiencing discrimination in gatekeeping decisions, the artists did not openly address the discrimination. Remaining silent about discrimination or other work-related concerns is a common phenomenon in the arts and cultural sector (Visuri et al., 2023). Freelancers, in particular, find themselves in a vulnerable position when dealing with discriminatory situations compared to those in more secure employment positions. They remain silent to avoid the loss of social status, group membership, professional standing, or job opportunities (Visuri et al., 2023). Consequently, discrimination is portrayed in these stories as something people endure without contesting in the given situations.
Obviously, the interview situation and the recipient-design of the stories determined how they were told and what details were mentioned. The stories were about changes and uncertainties in artistic careers, and only in the last case was the story a response to a direct question about experiences of discrimination. Thus, the stories were motivated differently: the first two stressed agency and autonomy, regaining control over life events. It is important to notice the narrative-contextual issues that affect how (un)problematic discrimination seems. Consequently, the form and framing of the storytelling should not distract from the structural issues and problematic gatekeeping practices in the cultural sector that are also recognized in previous research. Our findings contribute to understanding storying discrimination in the cultural sector: the narrations produce precarious but thriving and agentive freelancers and reflect entrepreneurial attitudes. How stories are constructed is significant in addressing discrimination among freelancers: it must be recognized what contributes to the ways stories are told and be mindful of the seriousness of those experiences. In addition to the distributive aspects, our analysis draws attention to the processual aspects of social justice: It is not only about the outcome (making it as an artist) but also about how the artists are treated in the processes in which resources are allocated.
To tackle the silences around discrimination in working life, future analyses should include opportunities and practices to name negative experiences. This would contribute to better understanding of the significance of the resources involved in sharing negative experiences and achieving change.
In all, our findings foregrounded the different dimensions of intersectionality identified by Crenshaw (1991), drawing attention to structural aspects, such as the material realities of income loss and the precariousness of freelancer positions; political aspects, like the invisibility of experiences when category relationships are overlooked; and representational aspects, where the artistic contributions of minorities are devalued if they do not align with the tastes of those gatekeeping the art form. While career paths may be forged despite gatekeeping, but the underlying structures often remain unchallenged.
Recognizing the duality in category relationships for performing artists could help identify ways to address discrimination. In all the cases presented, category relationships appeared both positively and negatively: on the one hand, the artists experienced discriminatory identity slights; on the other, their identifications served as sources of empowerment, employment, and creativity. All of them seemed to have found their niche and achieved success. However, the question remains whether such a niche is acceptable for the artists concerning their identities, artistic aspirations, and livelihoods. From the perspective of artistic development, social justice can be jeopardized if performers become locked into positions they cannot change. The dualism of social categories should be recognized as a significant feature of intersectionality in the competitive field of performing arts.
Footnotes
Appendix 1
Transcription symbols used in the data extracts:
See more on the transcription conventions: Jefferson, G. (2004) Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In Lerner, G. (ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the first Generation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 13–31.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped develop our article.
Data availability statement
Interview data are currently in use for the project and have not yet been archived.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Research Council of Finland (grant number 339263).
Ethical approval and informed consent statements
This research is part of a larger research project titled Accounting for interactionally troublesome exchanges: paradoxes, biases, and inequalities in storying, perceiving, and countering problematic social experiences, which has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the Tampere Region. Informed consent was obtained verbally from all interviewees, and this was recorded. Participants received written information regarding data protection and the purposes of the research prior to their involvement.
