Gendered Performative Resilience: Workplace Incivility, Emotional Labour and Women's Professional Lives in Bollywood.

Abstract

The study of Bollywood is mostly done from the perspective of representation, stardom and cultural influence, and the working conditions of women in film production is comparatively studied less. This paper takes a theoretical look at gendered incivility as an occupational experience and proposes a theory that links casual mistreatment to emotional labour and professional self-presentation and psychological vulnerability. It builds upon the scholarship on workplace incivility, selective incivility, emotional labour, gendered creative labour and performative resilience, to create the concept of gendered performative resilience, which is defined as the visible performance of composure, adaptability and professional collaboration when resisting workplace adverse conditions is deemed to be costly. The paper makes a case for why workplace mistreatment is important, both because of what happens in the moment, but also because of the occupational calculations that account for women's reactions to mistreatment. The primary mechanism that connects gendered mistreatment to emotional-labour demands and performative resilience is perceived costs of resistance. Publicly documented information on women working in Hindi cinema is not used as representative empirical data. The paper suggests that precarity of employment, informal employment networks, and the visibility of the job are likely to accelerate the process while professional agency, supportive networks, and credible institutional mechanisms may slow down the process. The paper is an attempt to draw attention away from the issue of whether women are resilient to the issue of why resilience may be a working requirement in gendered creative labour, and reconnects workplace incivility research to cultural-labour and cinema studies...