Un-doing Gender: Organizing and Dis-organizing Performance
Special Issue Editors David Knights, University of Keele & Alison
Pullen, University of York
Organizations are characterised by being scenes of constraint, full of
incessant activity, where gender is "done" often unknowingly, frequently
mechanically and inevitably improvised. Studies of gender and
organization have largely focused on the processes of doing gender as an
organized performance, often a project of achievement and completeness -
whether in producing or reproducing gendered identities and discourses
or resisting and subverting them. However gender doing involves
considerable ambiguity, incompleteness, fragmentation and fluidity - and
it is often tied up with processes of undoing at levels of identity,
self, text and practice. As a discourse, doing or undoing gender or any
other social relation is not particularly new (Game, 1991; Lorraine,
1990) but Judith Butler's book Undoing Gender has given it a new lease
of life. She connects the performance of gender with both its
organization and its disorganization as she brings together a collection
of essays on 'the experiences of becoming undone in both good and bad
ways'. In particular, she shows how in the search for recognition, we
can easily become undone by the norms that confer such recognition
leaving us forced to live a life that is not worth living. This Special
Issue is focused on how gender gets done and undone in organizations and
through organizing, and with what consequences. We also see the Issue
offering a platform for exploring how our gender projects are caught up
in a multiplicity of often conflicting desires, doubts and discourses
within shifting spaces and times that can indeed threaten the very
concept of gender itself. As Butler contends 'Sometimes a normative
conception of gender can undo one's personhood, undermining the capacity
to persevere in a liveable life. Other times, the experience of a
normative restriction becoming undone can undo a prior conception of who
one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one that has greater
liveability as its aim' (ibid.). We invite participants to see this
Issue as a space to engage theoretically with rethinking gender as a
construct to explore possibilities for difference, and also empirically
to explore its doing and undoing in everyday organizational practice.
Some areas that contributors may like to consider are:
* Gender, sexuality and identity
* Gender and change
* Gender front and backstage
* Gendered cultures
* Organizing sexualised spaces
* Dramaturgical approaches to gender
* Oppression and resistance
* Performing research on gender; performing research as gendered
subjects
* Deconstructing gender talk
* Signs and symbols of gender
* Organizational life as a gendered theatre of action
* Performance and the body
* Virtual genders
* Gender representations in the media and film
* Imaginary genders
Complete papers (not under review elsewhere) should be sent to both
editors by May 31st 2006. Please copy also to the editorial assistant
Annie Dempsey [log in to unmask] Please contact the guest
editors if you wish to discuss an idea or proposal for a paper. Email
Alison on [log in to unmask] or David on [log in to unmask] For
submission guidelines please consult the Gender, Work and Organization
Journal at:
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0968-6673
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