The subjectivity load: Negotiating the internalization of “mother” and “creative worker” identities in creative industries

Anne O’ Brien

Gender, Work and Organization, 2025, vol. 32, issue 1, 369-384

Abstract: This paper explores how mothers who are creative workers articulate their subjectivities and examines how their interdependent identities as both mothers and creatives lead to a constant and unresolved negotiation of subjectivity. This constitutes an additional cognitive work burden or a “subjectivity load” for mother‐creatives. The study is based on a small‐scale qualitative study of 40 mothers working in Creative Industries in Ireland. Venn's framework on subjectivity is used to explore the attitudes, values, expectations, and dispositions that respondents articulated when questioned about how they saw the self in relation to the identities of mother and worker. Key findings note that mother workers held ambivalent attitudes about the combination of mothering with work. In terms of their values, respondents internalized a negative and irresolute sense of self if they did not live up to social values on motherhood. With regard to expectations of themselves, mothers felt that they were always having to choose between conflicting demands and that there was an internalized expectation that motherhood should be prioritized over work. Finally, in terms of their disposition, respondents explained they felt that society refused to understand mothers as artists and so they could not easily achieve a settled subjectivity in light of the invisibility of mothers who were also creative workers. Consequently, mother‐creatives are always engaged in a process of negotiation across identity contradictions to form their own subjectivities. This ongoing ambivalence creates another cognitive or subjectivity load around the making and remaking of the internalized self.

Date: 2025
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