CREATIVITY AS A CONTESTED SITE OF IDENTITY- MAKING: Careers, gender and diaspora for Sydney’s Lebanese Australians

Drawing on qualitative research with Lebanese Australian young women and men, this chapter offers insights into the lived experiences of career-making for Sydney’s creative and cultural workers. In particular, it focuses on how Lebanese Australian young adults manage cultural expectations around gender and how they shape career choices and pathways. For some Lebanese Australian young people, engaging in the performativity of ethnicity, particularly within predominantly white-dominated and middle-class spaces, offers a unique niche pathway into highly competitive sectors. In this way, creativity becomes a floating signifier in the context of Lebanese Australian young people’s lives, disrupting attachments to a Lebanese Australian community and localised ideas of masculinity and femininity. Creativity, as a contested site of identity-making, is further explored as an avenue to redress stereotypes, develop subcultural bonds within and outside diaspora, and complicate expected traditional routes of social mobility for young Lebanese Australian people. Building on the scholarship that suggests that diaspora refers to material and symbolic border making and crossing/s, this chapter considers what kind of bordering of the self these diasporic subjects engage with. This question is interrogated particularly as it relates to the transformation and reconfiguration of gendered identity-making across generations within the Lebanese Australian diaspora.