5. Young Women’s Aspirations and Transitions into, through and away from Contemporary Creative Work

This chapter considers the lived experiences of realising aspirations for creative working lives, drawing on a longitudinal study of the transitions of young female creative aspirants in England. Participants were first interviewed in 2007–2008 when they were in education and training for the performing arts. Coming of age under New Labour, these young women were addressed by what Angela McRobbie (Be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. Cambridge: Polity, 2016) calls a ‘creativity dispositif’, which encouraged young people to seek careers in the creative economy. Follow-up interviews conducted several years later explored whether and how participants’ aspirations had been realised, reshaped or relinquished. In this chapter, I consider how these young women subjectively accounted for their transitions into, through or away from the creative economy. I discuss how participants encountered and interpreted the complex challenges associated with creative work—including precarity, low pay, informal networking and typecasting—and consider the resources and strategies drawn upon to navigate these. The analysis highlights the role of gender, class and race in shaping opportunities for making a living within the creative economy. In doing so, it offers a critical counterpoint to optimistic framings of creative work as offering unfettered opportunities for young people—especially those from marginalised groups.