This article investigates occupational identity construction among contemporary Canadian professional visual artists. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews I draw on the perceptions and subjective experiences of 80 Toronto visual artists to explore how individuals consciously articulate and act upon an occupational identity that they have carefully and deliberately chosen. I demonstrate how the informal nature of artistic occupational definitional parameters can render the title ‘professional artist’ an empty signifier. Given the limited means of clearly distinguishing between professional and amateur, and the lack of recognition attributed to artistic labour as ‘real’ work, I argue that professional status comes largely from drawing on a repertoire of shared myths and stereotypes to help create an artistic identity and project it to others.

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In this paper we examine how the researcher's body can be used as a tool for data collection in the process of ethnographic fieldwork. We focus in particular on the tensions inherent in undertaking embodied ethnographic research in the sexualized setting of a queer women's bathhouse event in Toronto, Canada. Our discussion addresses three moments within the research process: preparing our bodies to attend the bathhouse; positioning our bodies within the spaces of the bathhouse; and interacting with our bodies during the event. Through this discussion we argue that the body of the researcher is a contested site of knowledge production.

This paper examines the role of the neighbourhood in the construction of artistic identities. Drawing upon in‐depth, semistructured interviews with Canadian visual artists from Toronto, I identify some of the common features of downtown Toronto neighbourhoods where artists congregate. I demonstrate that artists are drawn to neighbourhoods that have not been gentrified and do not directly reflect current dominant values in society. I focus, in particular, on the importance of marginal niches of improvisational space within the urban fabric. Marginal spaces, often neglected and overlooked, weakly classified and in a state of becoming, I argue, are essential to the development and sustenance of an artistic identity.

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This article critically examines the play of power in the co-production of scholarly knowledge in the context of a queer, feminist Participatory Action Research (PAR) project. By unpacking the power relations inherent in crafting a narrative of a collective project for a broader audience, we consider the conflicts, silences, and erasures that we experienced as participants, gatekeepers, and co-authors. We analyze iterations of a co-produced conference and journal article papers to recall the power dynamics that framed and reframed the outcomes of this project. In so doing, we critique what ‘co-’ and ‘with’ actually mean in the practice of publishing queer feminist PAR. We argue that there is an accelerating process of de-participation and exclusion that can work to erode the progressive, inclusive politics of feminist participatory methodologies.

In this paper I draw on interviews with professional visual artists in Toronto, Canada to reconstruct an occupation-specific reading of the urban landscape. I use a detailed examination of one specific occupational identity to reveal the intricate relationship between self, work, and context at different spatial scales. The underlying mechanism that supports the articulation and negotiation of artistic identities, I argue, is the sustained tension between absence and presence, visibility and invisibility within different spaces of the urban fabric.