Luovuuden dispositiivi, sukupuoli ja taiteellisen työn prekarisoituminen

Abstract

The aim of this article is to open up theoretical perspectives to the research of the status of the artists and especially on its gender analysis. My principal points of references are the writings of a British cultural theorist Angela McRobbie and her concepts of dispositif of creativity and postfeminist sexual contract. The Foucauldian concept dispositif of creativity is used to illustrate how the features of artistic working conditions are infuenced by the wider and creativity-emphasizing current of changes taking place in the general sphere of production, therefore making the working conditions of the people working in the artistic sphere even more precarious. At the same time the model of “working like an artist” becomes a prominent feature not only in the creative sector but in other industries as well. All these features and transitions are also gendered in manifold ways. The concept of postfeminist sexual contract implies that the importance of young and highly educated women is constantly growing so that the so-called “top girls” have now become the ideal worker subjects of the post-Fordist era. This is not to say that gender inequality issues are disappeared, even though there is a certain kind of a post-feminist illusion of equality taking place across the society. Because of this “postfeminist masquerade” the inequalities are being reshaped and therefore becoming more diffcult to grasp. In this article I will present the main features of these two concepts and use them to analyze the changes taking place in the Finnish context of artistic activity by referring to previous empirical research fndings implemented in the feld. As a conclusion I suggest that the increased amount of self-employers and free artists in the Finnish artistic feld goes hand in hand with the growing importance of individualization implemented by the dispositif of creativity. This development also leads to new forms of gender inequality, such as the growing importance of the precarious or ‘untypical’ working position of working as a free artist, self-employer or entrepreneur as an explanatory factor of the income gap between male and female artists.