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This article explores the complexity of minority creative workers in the media industry. It challenges the common notion in the literature that minority creative workers are fully submissive to the dominant power structure and examines whether such workers could still be conceived as active agents by resisting submission and marginalization even when they cannot influence their own representation in hegemonic media texts. To answer this question, it explores the performances of minority creative workers in a hegemonic cultural industry. To determine whether one can speak of subaltern agency and, if possible, examine how it manifests itself in reality, it addresses the daily performances of Palestinian creative workers during the production of the second season of the Israeli television series, Fauda. Observations conducted during production demonstrate that since in such contexts minority creative workers cannot avoid being projected in negative roles in the media text, they adopt creative subversive practices of passing and transgressive mimicry, resisting full compliance with the production, without endangering their own position. By doing so, the article contributes not only to the emerging field of creative entrepreneurship in cultural production, but also enables determination of common practices of creative subversion in the cultural industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Reality’ television is a global and highly popular television phenomenon. Despite its public and academic critique as cultural ‘trash’, the genre enjoys great economic legitimacy. In recent years, other ‘trashy’ television genres, such as soap operas, have gained aesthetic-artistic legitimacy alongside their economic legitimacy. Taking a Bourdieusian approach and using the discourse about Israeli ‘reality’ shows as a case study, this article addresses the question of whether a similar process is evident in television critics’ attitudes towards reality television. Using quantitative and qualitative content analysis of reviews of ‘reality’ shows between 2003 and 2014, the article shows that the main question debated in such reviews is the genre’s morality rather than its aesthetic value: for Israeli critics, it is the moral attributes of these shows, not their aesthetic or artistic worth, which determine their ‘quality’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study focuses on the social construction of definitions of quality in the field of the television drama series in Israel. By doing that, this work challenges Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that since artifacts of ‘popular culture’ industries are not regarded as ‘autonomous’, according to the autonomy-of-art ideology, they cannot be consecrated as works of art. Bourdieu’s thesis was challenged before, but the television field has not yet been extensively studied from this point of view. My study of the broad empirical corpus, including television reviews and interviews with acclaimed Israeli television creators, reveals that artistic quality and commercial appeal show less tension than Bourdieu had suggested. Furthermore, my findings indicate that the autonomy-of-art ideology can be reconfigured to accommodate commercial (e.g. capitalist) considerations. Within this reconfiguration, the ‘quality’ television series can be redefined to include elements of ‘autonomous’ art, such as authenticity, innovation and the input of ‘genius’ creators, alongside such capitalist requirements as profitability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]