College of Arts & Humanities

Glasgow Theatre Seminar

Glasgow Theatre Seminar | School of Culture & Creative Arts | College of Arts
Date: Thursday 09 March 2023
Time: 17:30
Venue: seminar room 123a, Gilmorehill Building, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ
Category: Films and theatre, Public lectures, Academic events, Student events
Speaker: Katie Hart
Website: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fangirls-gatekeepers-change-makers-scottish-women-as-cultural-leaders-tickets-558548061287

Fangirls, Gatekeepers, Change-Makers: Scottish Women as Cultural Leaders

Thursday 9th March 2023, 5.30pm. This event is hybrid, with in-person and Zoom attendance options.
Part of the Glasogw Theatre Seminar, organised by Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow.

The next speaker in the Glasgow Theatre Seminar series will be Katie Hart, who will be sharing insights from her recently completed PhD on women’s cultural leadership in Scotland.
 

This talk explores the role that women play as cultural leaders in Scotland, and asks what we might learn from that work about women’s experience of national identity. Drawing on my recently completed PhD thesis project, I advocate for the importance of an intersectional approach to analysis of gender inequality in the Scottish theatre sector, and for how focusing on specifically on women’s leadership might produce new knowledge of the nuances of gender inequality in this context.

As part of the methodology for my PhD project, I carried out a series of interviews with women working as leaders in Scottish theatre. These interviews focused on the complexities of leading as a woman in an often male-dominated industry. Two threads emerged in these interviews that I would like to unpack over the course of this paper. Firstly, I was struck by repeated references to the Scottish theatre sector as a ‘community’, and I wish to further explore how the emphasis on this community and on informal networking can exacerbate inequality in the sector, particularly for the most marginalised women. The rhetoric around community could perhaps give a false sense of widespread non-hierarchical working within the sector, and it is with this in mind that I approach the second thread in this paper, asking what leadership looks like for women in this ‘community’. Female leaders are often negotiating complex power dynamics in which they individually may hold power but simultaneously be confronting structural inequalities through which they are disadvantaged.

Whilst the success of a small number of often privileged women is sometimes taken as indicative of wider improvement in gender equality, my focus on female leaders will demonstrate that this is a reductive approach that fails to consider the power dynamics between different groups of women, and how women may participate in upholding patriarchal structures. This talk asks us to consider what we might learn about equality by looking beyond statistics about how many women are in a given role, and instead consider in greater detail the experiences of those women.

IN PERSON – seminar room 123a, Gilmorehill Building, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ. www.accessable.co.uk/university-of-glasgow/access-guides/gilmorehill-halls

ONLINE – register via Eventbrite at: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fangirls-gatekeepers-change-makers-scottish-women-as-cultural-leaders-tickets-558548061287

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