“New” to Whom? How French New Wave Gendered Change

Despite institutional work studies' growing concern with gender, few attempts have been made to examine how gender-work binding has been made throughout institutional change. Addressing this literature lacuna helps explain the stubborn transmission of gender inequality from one form of organizational novelty to another (Ridgeway, 2011). By conceiving gendering as a specific form of institutional work, we examine how gendering work is performed such that male superiority and labor division are perpetuated underneath the progressive, revolutionary appearance of an institutional change. After investigating the historical case of French New Wave, we identify four types of institutional work – namely, deconstructing, constructing, defending, and silencing, baking gender hierarchy into new roles that the art movement proposed. Our study makes two contributions. First, by dissecting the gendered change of New Wave, we contribute to unraveling the puzzling persistence of gender inequality despite continuous waves of social change and organizational novelty (Tilly, 1998). In so doing, we also explain why our collective imagery about artistic creativity and craftsmanship has been colonized by masculinity. Second, we contribute to gendering literature by illustrating diachronic (i.e., deconstructing, constructing, and defending) and synchronic (i.e., silencing) axes underpinning gendering work dictating what women are willing and capable of doing. On the one hand, we demonstrate "history as strategy" to expose and break the body-work associations (Ashcraft & Ashcraft, 2015). On the other hand, we foreground the discursive disentanglement of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) – that is, cruel (i.e., the unsaid darkness) x optimism (i.e., the said fantasy) – as crucial to making visible the delicate but potent gendering work in contemporary organizing.