engleski

Narrating female labour experience: construction of the professional biography by omitting discriminating practices

This paper aims to explore the process of narrating female professional biography. Building upon Anne Witz’s concept of professional project it is argued that in order to narratively construct a coherent professional biography women tend to exclude and omit experiences of discriminating practices. The proposed claim is based on the empirical material gathered through interviews with female visual communication designers in Croatia. This profession has undergone educational, organizational and economical institutionalisation during the past two decades, making it a relatively new profession in the sense of defining the formal criteria for entering and succeeding in the profession. In this so-called process of professional closure, women have participated in dual process: they have managed to open up and enter the profession on institutional level alongside men, while at the same time they have instigated the formalization and closing of the profession in the relation to other similar aspiring professions. This strategy of dual closure (A. Witz) has left women in ambivalent position. Since the professional project turned out to be their own, female designers had to incorporate and naturalize experiences of discriminating practices as the individual, but not structural part of their own professional biography. While narrating professional biography, female designers have only sporadically named instances of discrimination. During the interviewing process this has come up as an occasional addendum to otherwise coherent experience. Discrimination was defined as singular excess of impolite and primitive individuals, whom interviewed designers learned to ignore and cope with. The profession itself was deemed egalitarian, supportive and equally lucrative for both genders. In order to justify the participation in dual closure process, female designers have subsumed discrimination to individual mistake. However, complete analysis of interviews and the collaborative secondary data on professional hierarchy, shows that the design profession does entail aspects of structural discrimination that are not stated in female designers’ narration of professional biography.

narrative interview ; standpoint approach ; labour experience ; women

nije evidentirano