Adderley Positive Research Incubator
Hosted by: Center for Positive Organizations

A Clown Car of One’s Own: How Women Creatives Cultivate Space for Creative Work through Generative Reclamation
Featured Scholar: Martina Pizzinato, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management

Description: Women in male-dominated occupations often face barriers to expressing aspects of their self at work, as the self is often marginalized and they are encouraged to conceal it. This may be particularly consequential in creative work, where self-expression is central, and pressures to suppress the self may directly undermine the very basis on which such work relies. As a result, women engaged in creative work may experience a tension between the expressive demands of their work and workplace contexts that marginalize the expression of their self. In this paper, I thus examine how women engaged in creative work achieve self-expression when the self is marginalized. Drawing on an inductive, qualitative study of women in the stand-up comedy industry, I identify generative reclamation – the process through which women embrace and amplify experiences of marginalization, as well as marginalized aspects of the self, through their creative work. Through this process, women come to view their marginality not as a constraint but as a generative force that enriches and transforms their creative work. This study advances literature by showing how and when women achieve self-expression through the affirmation of a marginalized self and by introducing a novel creative process that shapes how they ascribe meaning to their creative work.