female artists' performance of expertise on social media

Female artists’ performance of expertise on social media

Karen Patel

ArtistEntrepreneur =Expert

The genius male artist

“Apparently miraculous, nondetermined, and asocial nature of artistic achievement […] The artist, in the nineteenth-century Saints’ Legend, struggles against the most determined parental and social opposition […] and ultimately succeeds against all odds”(Nochlin, 1971:155).

Masculine entrepreneur

• ‘Selfishness’ required to be entrepreneurial conflicts with women’s natural tendencies

• Women reluctant to self-promote because it is associated with ‘pushy behaviour’ (Scharff, 2015)

• Women’s ‘natural tendencies’ automatically put them at a disadvantage

What is expertise?

A social process, involving a generally positive consensus about someone’s knowledge and competency within a particular field. This is substantiated by reputation, which is forged through relevant working relationships and associations with others.

Why expertise?

Methods

Jones, C. (2002) Signaling expertise: How signals shape careers in creative industries. In Career creativity: Explorations in the remaking of work pp.209-228.

• Institutional context (the context of the user, their background and career trajectory)

• Signalling content (the aesthetic style of social media text and images, exhibiting the requisite skills in both their social media posts and presentation of their art, and career relevant connections and interactions on social media)

• Signalling strategies (using social media affordances such as retweets to enhance status, the type of relationships pursued and how they are manifest on social media, and strategic approaches to impression management on social media).

Signalling expertise framework

Mutual aid

Development of “bottom-up infrastructures to support independent work” (de Peuter and Cohen, 2015:306)

• Mutual aid and collaboration brings benefits to all artists involved through reciprocal sharing

• Brings more exposure to their work, contributing to their performance of expertise

“I always thought that because you’re competing for the same work people would be really precious about things, but I’ve had people that are really qualified for the same things and they tell me ‘oh have you applied for this yet?’ It’s a very…as far as I can tell…it’s really inclusive, people are really helpful, people are really supportive of each other.”

Jamila, artist (2016)

“It’s great to have support from other writers, we can support each other. and we can share information and advice and blog posts and ultimately it’s made me a better writer because of the things I’ve been able to do through the people I know on Facebook and Twitter.”

Lisa, writer (2015)

What does it all mean?Technofeminism?

• Wajcman (2007) technology and gender as ‘mutually shaping’

• Johnson (2010) “Feminist technologies will be those in which artifacts and social relations will work together to achieve gender equitable arrangements” where “technology and feminism come together around social relations”

What does it all mean?

• Positive opportunities offered by social media platforms for mutual aid and collaboration between female artists

• Expertise perspective less individualistic than self-branding, self-promotion

• Feminist performances of expertise?

Thank youkaren.patel@bcu.ac.uk

http://karenpatelresearch.wordpress.com@KarenPatel