Working in the Holes: A Third-Wave Feminist Filmmaker’s Take on Labor

Six months ago I landed a dream job. With it comes a regular paycheck; health insurance; paid vacation; prestige within the admittedly narrow circles of academia; and the approval, finally, of my second-wave feminist mother. Yes, I am the rare filmmaker with a tenure-track teaching position at a major university. But I won’t lie to you: when I reflect back on my various experiments across my working life to balance paid labor with my filmmaking, I am ambivalent about where I find myself today.

On the one hand, what kind of feminist wouldn’t be proud of competing successfully for a job that shouts “professional achievement,” especially in such a tight labor market—a job that manifests the feminist ambitions of her mother’s generation? On the other hand, I dearly miss “the holes,” the gaps in my old workday schedules back when I was an audiovisual technician. I exploited those holes to make films in much the same way my fellow third-wave feminists exploited the resources of their part-time jobs to crank out zines, music, and art.

What follows is a personal meditation on labor, feminist history, and feminist filmmaking. Can this feminist filmmaker—a former audiovisual tech, film projectionist, and union member—find peace, happiness, and the “holes” she needs to continue making films in her new job as an assistant professor?

When I moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, artists of my generation were prioritizing their creative work over more traditional careers. Punk rock, anticorporate, and do-it-yourself (DIY) ideology dominated the San Francisco art scene, propagated through DIY zines such as Working for the Man, Dishwater Pete, and Temp Slave. Artists largely avoided the siren call of lucrative corporate careers, opting to work part-time jobs that allowed them to paint, write, or make films or music instead of becoming cogs in the system. Most DIYers believed it was better to work a part-time job and create their own culture than participate in the establishment.

During this time, rebellious young women, angry that they were relegated to the punk-rock sidelines, started an underground feminist movement. Riot Grrrls advocated that women make their own media, whatever their skill levels or resources. It was important, they argued, to distribute feminist media that was smart and political as an alternative to the mainstream media’s limited and often demeaning representation of women. They adopted the idea that “cultural production is a key site of struggle.”¹ Inspired by Riot Grrrls and the punk-rock DIY ethic, I set out to make Grrlyshow (2001), a film about grrrl zines. But to pay the bills, I took on a job working as an audiovisual technician.

I didn’t make a lot of money working as an AV tech, but the job gave me the cash I needed to both pay my rent and make films—Grrlyshow was followed by Bachelorette, 34 (2009), which offered a sassy, third-wave feminist rebuttal to the media’s pervasive, and pervasively damaging, stereotypes of women. But the Riot Grrrl approach to art, industry, and labor placed me in direct conflict with the upwardly mobile second-wave feminist vision of career advancement with which I’d grown up.

Working a part-time blue-collar job instead of pursuing a more prestigious and lucrative career was anathema to my second-wave feminist mother, who raised my sisters and me on books such as Girls Can Be Anything and Free to Be You and Me.²Girls Can Be Anything featured pictures of eight-year-old girls in a variety of jobs: president of the United States, brain surgeon, astronaut. Blue-collar jobs, AV tech among them, were conspicuously absent. My mom reminded me that her generation fought for equal pay and equal access to jobs and professional advancement. She was worried that I was squandering my career opportunities and “living like a retired person.” I explained to my mother that for feminists in my generation, creative work unleashed through alternative media is as powerful a tool for change...