Qualitative interview study reveals how backgrounding practices marginalize background actors in film and television, highlighting mechanisms of occupational irrelevance.
Key Points
To theorize how workers in the backdrop of a workplace are sociologically framed as occupationally irrelevant, using film and television background actors as a focal case.
Conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with unionized and non-unionized background actors working in the Canadian screen industry.
Identified three primary backgrounding practices that naturalize marginal status: silencing, dividing, and objectifying.
Showed that backgrounding constitutes workplace dynamics where labor remains visually apparent but is socially constructed as irrelevant, extending theoretical models of invisible and hidden low-status work.