Creative work is often deeply personal, serving as a powerful medium for self-expression. Yet the environments in which creatives work can be hostile to such expression, particularly for those creatives with marginalized identities. Understanding how marginalized creatives experience this tension is essential to advancing our understanding of creative work as a social process—one shaped not only by collaboration and relationships but also by identity and inequality. Drawing on an inductive, qualitative study of women in the stand-up comedy industry, I identify the marginalized creativity tension—a tension women face between the marginalized creative threats embedded in their creative environments and their own marginalized creative values. In response to this tension, women engage in generative reclamation, a process of embracing and amplifying marginalized aspects of themselves to construct an alternative system of creative values, work, and community. Through this process, women come to view their gender not as a limitation but as a generative force that enriches and transforms their creative work. This study contributes to creativity and creative work literature by showing how marginalized creatives’ identities and experiences of marginalization not only shape how they engage in creative work but also how they define its meaning and purpose.

Keywords: creativity, creative work, marginalization, qualitative methods.