The gendered side of New Bohemia. Professional Women in the cultural economy

The economy of late modernity is more and more characterized by the so-called cultural jobs, producing knowledge through knowledge and feeding the diffuse market of the immaterial goods. In the knowledge economy, as cultural and symbolic economy, the most important resources are represented by knowledge and creativity. Creators and producers of immaterial goods seem therefore to be the new workers in the economy of the uncertainty, i.e. flexible, performative, independent, responsible and highly uncertain. This social group, as the late version of cultural intermediaries described by Bourdieu, are the present social actors in the metropolitan markets of culture and in the gentrification processes proceeding in many post-modern cities. They have been described in so different and evocative ways: as Intellos precaires, as Bourgeois-Bohemians (Bo-Bos), as New Creative Class, as Itinerant Experts, as New Bohemia. Inside this creative and precarious people, women represent today a remarkable part, till now so little explored. The paper will focus the gendered side of New Bohemia. Data from some recent Italian researches will be presented, focusing on professional women in cultural and artistic fields, i.e. visual and performative arts, new media, communication and research areas. Two researches have been realised in a cultural urban area (in Bologna), another one is a national survey on women in cultural jobs, and the last one analyse the careers of young visual artists in Italy. The paper will consider the gendered profile of the new creative class and the coming out of a new social group: young adult metropolitan talented women, cosmopolitan minded, innovation-oriented, with a multiple professional training, often settled in weak and mobile social ties - as singleness-, with high cultural capital and consumptions, and finally with a great capability to cope with precariousness and the uncertainty of an acrobatic cocktails of activities and jobs. Considering the multifaceted profile of New Bohemia women - as new professionals of culture – the paper suggests that it seems to be not (only) a generational trait associated with professional biographies, but the result of the unsettled feature of jobs in the knowledge economy.