I am in recovery from working for arts nonprofit girl bosses, and maybe you are too.
In the last five years, three arts nonprofit girl bosses — all Gen Xers with charismatic names — hired me because I was competent enough to not create extra work for them, but not so self-assured to work without their approval. I had spent enough time in white art spaces to mimic their whimsical, yet elevated aesthetic, but brought an I-desperately-need-to-work realness that would allow them to stay in control.
My grasp on the origins of the arts nonprofit girlboss is mostly experiential and anecdotal, but I imagine that she emerged through some combined forces of late capitalism, white feminism, and as my mom calls it, “the unkept promises of Title IX”. To be an arts nonprofit girl boss is more than to be a woman who works in the arts nonprofit sector, it is about embodying a relationship to work that creates more work and stress for everyone around you. It’s a relationship to competence, drive, and passion that produces a busy-ness tornado, under the guise of visual and performing arts (and sometimes equity, diversity and inclusion). It is a sacrificial orientation to community programming where both the organizers and the community are required to suffer for their art. In short, it is the kind of manic relationship to “doing meaningful work” that makes sense coming from people who are simultaneously oppressed and rewarded for wanting security in this economic system.
The plight of the arts nonprofit girlboss is reproduced in her workplace relationships, which are almost always tumultuous, if not toxic. She thrives in failing organizations, where she can take on the work of employees who are laid off or quit out of frustration, always arriving as the savior who can do it all. She is enabled both by co-workers who have empathy for the woundedness exhibited by her behavior, and by co-workers who get their masochist kicks by being able to handle her harshness and unachievable standards.
I am worried that grouping these hard working women together is misogynist, because that’s what they all would say. Arts nonprofit girl bosses are very concerned with misogyny.
I am writing about this now, with dead kids on my mind, because I feel that divesting my labor from arts nonprofit girl bosses would be a step towards every kind of healing and growth I want for myself in this lifetime. Working under (read: pleasing and serving) this kind of woman has, historically, exhausted me into a state of political deactivation, where my world becomes so fixated on the urgent needs of the school or nonprofit I’m working for, that it feels impossible to extend myself outside of work. I might have even submitted to co-authoring a narrative with my boss that the work of arts nonprofits and schools is revolutionary and therefore the best place to put all of my time, values, and resources. As long as children in this country are a marginalized and underserved group, this narrative has traction. But I don’t believe that the arts nonprofit girl boss is in the work to care for children anymore. I believe she persists in the work in order to make herself — and consequently the system she operates in — irreplaceable.
I watch comedian Nicole Daniels’ nonprofit boss videos every time they emerge on my feed. A Black lesbian, Daniels’ impersonation of this typically white, mildly queer-coded (definitely has a husband) woman is astute. The nonprofit boss is always addressing an off-camera employee, named Nicole, and justwantstocircleback to things like Nicole’s requested time off (spoiler: it’s been denied). These videos are hilariously disturbing in their accuracy, even when the topics are as wild as “do I still have to come into work if I die?” The comments are full of people who feel they’ve worked for this exact person, museum shop accessory scarves and all.
It is threatening to the arts nonprofit girl boss' way of life that she is now so easily clocked by young employees, especially the queer and/or BIPOC employees she desperately wants to hire. Her union busting tactics are as recognizable as her neoliberal politics. To counter this, she typically holds tightly to some minorly marginalized identity that helps anchor her personal stories during anti-bias professional development. This identity, whether “as a Jewish woman”, “as a mom-trepreneur”, or (a new favorite, recently heard from a friend) “as a plant-based queer woman” helps her stretch away, however desperately, from being perceived as non-specific or unopposed in her journey. Her life has been full of hardship and that is why she works so hard andsoshouldyou.
When I used to work for arts nonprofit girl bosses, I was inspired to be the biggest, smallest version of myself. I worked hard because I was the only one who could work for the only one who could be in charge. No matter how corroded my boundaries became, when I received praise from my boss I felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be. I was both the empathetic bystander and the masochistic try-hard.
I do feel sorry for the arts nonprofit girl bosses I worked for. A few times, when we were alone after a long tech week or exhibition, one of my bosses would confide in me about her husband leaving or her daughter’s suicidal ideation. Another one came to work several hours after she had a miscarriage. She said she needed to be at work because she was in so much pain and work was a great distraction. She asked me to please not tell anyone about this. Even though I was deeply unhappy at that job and this woman was horrible to work under, I stayed four extra months because I was the only one who knew about her lost pregnancy. In making me feel needed, a sole witness to the hurt person behind the boss lady, she lit my proverbial torch of irreplaceability.
I used to think that it was possible to work under an arts nonprofit girl boss and be a sort of virus in the machine. Like somehow, I could ride in the wake of her program-initiating, gala-planning, organization-starting power and do little subversive acts that might one day add up to something meaningful. Truthfully, I think I still wanted her to like me. More specifically, I wanted her to like me even though I didn’t like her. I wanted her to know that I could be her if I wanted to, but that I didn’t actually want to. I would be remiss to say I didn’t learn anything under her mentorship. But any confidence I gained came with a sense of increased indebtedness to all that she had sacrificed to be my mentor in the first place. She was a very busy woman, after all. These are the kinds of twisted relationships that form when we’re moving with a state-level fear of rejection.
This week, I’m celebrating one year of quitting. I have compassion for arts nonprofit girl bosses, but I don’t work for them anymore. More than that, I am making it my work to become undesirable and unhireable to this kind of person in the future. I think only blessings will follow.