1 Marianna Fotaki Warwick Business School Warwick University Gender and the Organization: New conceptions of work and working lives 17th February Seminar Presented to The Gender and Diversity Research Group Faculty of Business Auckland university of Technology Marianna Fotaki Warwick Business School Warwick University
2 The content and structure of the bookIntroduction: aims, approaches & critiques Speaking as academic women (Butler & McRobbie) Gender and Psyche (Lacan) Visuality – seeing/gendering the body Intersectionality and Transnational Feminism Posthuman ethics of the body, compassion and care (Braidotti and Ettinger) Writing differently by drawing on the work of four feminist writers: Kathleen Stewart, Katherine Angel, Annette Khun and Diane Riley
3 Chapter 1 introduction: The issuesThe neoliberalisation of higher education in the UK and many other industrialised countries The persistent nature of gendered work relations in many occupations & new inequalities emerging The enterprising academic as the prototype of a new flexible worker of the future: unlimited freedom = unlimited availability and responsiveness?
4 Chapter 1: The aims To apply feminist psychosocial approaches to think differently how institutional structures are sustained inter-subjectively To draw on transnational feminist approaches to move away from a view of organisations as insular and disconnected from the global network of power and culture To use these to address multiple inequalities at work
5 Chapter 1: The frame & appr0aches iTheoretical ideas of Judith Butler: Subjectivation Passionate attachments Injurious recognition Angela McRobbie’s (2009) critique of post- feminism Transnational feminism to examine how organisations are embedded in the political economy, societal institutions and the global organisation of labour
6 The frame and approaches iiMarxist autonomist feminists – e.g. Silvia Federici analyzing the changes that capitalism has introduced in the process of social reproduction and, especially, the reproduction of labour-power. Rosi Braidotti appropriations of nomadic ethics after reading Gilles Deleuze. Bracha Ettinger – co-habitation, art as compassion and ethics of care
7 Chapter 2: pains and pleasures of gendered livesIdentity work is involved in being an academic Disadvantage which respondents interpret as arising from their gendered identity Self blame and reproach Exchange of ideas, exploration, freedom, feminine sociality Love, desire & collusion with self exploitation
8 Chapter 2: Judith butlerFor the subject to exist she must be intelligible to herself and the others, and this results in her subject-ion to societal norms even if these are injurious to herself. The subject’s passionate attachment to social norms are a precondition of its becomingness (Butler, 1993, 1999, 2004): these constitute her agency and open up a possibility for resistance. This is partly because bodies are composed of multiple forces which actively pursue self- enhancement, and which seek political change to encourage this pursuit.
9 Butler’s philosophy Lacanian and Hegelian inspired notion of the subject which is always relational and tied in with the need for recognition via instituted social norms and/or the others. The subject’s agency is located in its social performativity. Performativity conceptualises the paradox of identity as apparently fixed but inherently unstable, revealing (gender) norms requiring continual maintenance.
10 Chapter 2: Mcrobbie’s critique of post-feminismPost-feminism appropriates and normalises feminist ideas through the hegemony of gender inclusivity It is an inherent part of the neoliberal project Gender retrenchment is secured through the wide dissemination of discourses of female freedom and by maintaining the pretensions of equality (McRobbie, 2009: 55) Female equality is then often reversed and undone within popular culture and the new ‘feminine’ public sphere that dominates consumer driven culture
11 Chapter 3: Why do they work so hard?self-expression and passion are particularly attractive to academics because of the ethics of the profession and their predisposition to 'work hard' and 'do well‘ (Gill, 2010) neoliberal societal norms are reproduced and become inscribed in subjects’ psyches management of affect and the production of subjectivities by drawing on desire of subjects to be (recognised) by symbolic and literal others
12 Chapter 3: Passionate attachment & Injurious recognition‘the professed pleasure in work and indeed passionate attachment to something called ‘my own work’ where there is the possibility of the maximization of self-expression, provides a compelling status justification but also a disciplinary mechanism for tolerating not just uncertainty and self exploitation but also for staying unprofitably within the creative sector and not abandoning it altogether' (McRobbie, quoted in Gill, 2010).
13 Chapter 3: Subjection to the symbolic order (of Academia)‘hyperproductivity and visibility (output & impact being key words) required by external modes of regulation direct this desiring economy into ever more infantile and regressive modes – we want more – more, more, more - to be ‘world class’ to be ‘simply the best’’ Hey (2004:36).
14 Chapter 4: Seeing gender/imagining gender – bad education
15 Colonel West’s affair
16 Theory of seeing theory of the imbrication of the visual with the materiality of besuited bodies to suggest that the women who occupy public space have to desexualise themselves, hiding the fact of their penetrable bodies and pretending to the possibility that hidden beneath their clothes is a penis, and that she may thus possess the symbol of masculine authority, the phallus.
17 Chapter 5: TransnationalismTransnational feminism allows understanding the interconnectedness between what appear to be very local and specific conditions of living that is shaped by global power relations. It also offers new ways of understanding inequalities in organisations which reflect historically conditioned inequities that are: re-embedded, re-produced and re-enacted but also resisted by the organisational subjects themselves.
18 The world without men shirin neshat 2009
19 Chapter 5: Intersectionality and transnational feminismIntersectional feminists show that race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, disability have a profound impact on people’s position, career prospects and experiences in the workplace that organizations have a duty to tackle (Crenshaw, 1989; Holvino, 2010) Postcolonial/transnational feminism considers these effects on bodies in the nexus of power and domination constituting differential power regimes within, between and beyond nation states specifically, in the context of globalization (Mohanty, 1998; Fernandes, 2013)
20 chapter 6: New insights from feminist thinking‘Ethics of difference’ and ‘trans-subjectivity’ Connectedness, co-existence and compassion towards the other, grounded in the ‘matrixial borderspace’ (Ettinger, 2006) Corporeal, embodied nature of the matrixial (as related to the womb) denoting that ‘I’ is always inextricably linked to the unknown non-I or the Other/(m)other New ethical proposition for organizations as it invokes the idea of co-habitation and the joint relational space
21 Bracha L. Ettinger is a French – Israel artist and psychoanalyst. As an artist she works with different media, among them painting, video, graphical works, diaries and notebooks. Some of her works include text. Sometimes the presence of text is obvious, sometimes it is hidden under many layers of images and can be seen only as path or circuit.
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24 Ettinger theorizing on EthicsThe importance of materiality as an aspect of discourse The neglect of materiality (of discourse) in management and organization theory Accounting for materiality in/of discourse so more ethically-founded identities, relationships and practices can emerge
25 Rosi Braidotti Posthuman conceptions of embodied ethicsCombine a radical re-theorization of Deleuzian and Spinozist immanence Nomadic ethics as a spatio-temporal theory of becoming – new theory of an affirmative ethics of life The subject is multi-layered: understood affectively, environmentally and cognitively (Braidotti, 2006a, 2013) Theorizing new inclusive forms of researching, teaching and writing about issues that matter to the lives of many Bringing back ‘the active into activism’ (Braidotti, 2010).
26 Discussion: Feminism & academic imaginary in the time of crisisThe crisis can be productive and the climate of austerity can be liberating by putting to rest the illusory pursuits of responding to the invisible master. We should therefore, draw on all means available (including explorations of affective economy using discourse along with psychoanalysis for example) to dis-articulate assigned meanings held in the symbolic order To recover our collective capacity to think about feminist-inspired futures diminished in the context of ‘identity politics, postmodern critiques of enlightenment projects’ (Nicholson, 1990)
27 Conclusion: bringing feminism back inReclaim our transformative potential as knowledge creators and public intellectuals (Said, 2001) Dissect the management of social change and forms of gender power which operate within an illusion of positivity and progress but are in reality re-creating new gendered, racialised and classed forms of oppression McRobbie (2009: 10) Dismantle the rules of the symbolic order which oppresses us and create space for finding alternative meanings