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The cultural industries are major fields of producing, distributing and reflecting national icons and norms. They form major sites of contestation and conflictual self-categorization, especially in conflict zones. Our article explores the intersection between nationality and gender in cultural production in such contexts. It examines the engagement of Palestinian women filmmakers within the Israeli cultural industry, seeking to facilitate a better understanding of national minorities in the field of cultural production in conflict zones. Palestinian women filmmakers in Israel have introduced new themes that do not only address national issues that stand in tension between the Palestinian experience of oppression and the hegemony of the Zionist narrative in the Israeli cultural industries, but also challenge the prevalent patriarchal social values in Palestinian society. Exploring their experience allow us to better explicate the intersection of professional, gender and national factors in conditioning the cultural production of creative labour in conflict zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]