Katie Sullivan

None so queer as folk: Gendered expectations and transgressive bodies in leadership

This paper investigates the relationship between the body and leadership through a case study of a transgender leader. The study shows that the leader’s body, presumed gender, and gendered appearance are salient markers that employees use to make sense of leaders and leadership, and that this gendered nature of leadership shows the deep roots of gender dichotomies and the heterosexual matrix that permeate our understanding of leadership. These two findings lead us to emphasize the need to queer leadership. All leaders experience gendered restrictions, to some extent, via the social norms and expectations of the way leadership should be performed. The construction of leadership through a transgender body reminds us to stay open to the exploration of performativity, particularly the relationships between bodies, gender, sexuality, and leadership and how any body can benefit from queering leadership.

With(out) pleasure: Desexualization, gender and sexuality at work

This article explores desexualization in massage therapy as a complex interaction between therapists and clients wherein sexual subjectivities are co-constructed, reified and in one case revised to highlight how workers can create a professional sexual identity in the spaces between desexualization and re-eroticization. Findings suggest that organizational mandates for desexualization as well as therapists’ own framing maintains gendered subjectivities that paint men as aggressors and women as victims. It also offers, through the philosophy of one female therapist, an alternative to desexualization that seeks to encourage sexuality based on professionalism, respect and choice. A key implication of this study is that a more holistic and context-dependent view of work and workers is necessary for scholars and practitioners to understand the promise and perils of organizational desexualization.

A Touch Too Much: Negotiating Masculinity, Propriety and Proximity in Intimate Labour

This paper explores how men who perform intimate labour negotiate perceptions of themselves and their work through complex intersections of masculinity, proximity and propriety. Its focus is on the ways in which embodied organizational negotiations are shaped by gendered perceptions of bodily propriety in three examples of physically, sexually and/or emotionally intimate forms of labour: male massage therapists; men who work in sex shops; and men working as Santa Claus performers. While ostensibly quite different forms of work, each is shaped by the expectation that a ‘quality’ interaction with customers or clients will be based upon the nurturance of a close physical, sexual and/or emotional bond between the service provider and recipient, at the same time as maintaining appropriate bodily boundaries and professional distance. Mediating both imperatives requires a careful negotiation of being appropriately close while at the same time understanding that social perceptions of their work, themselves as workers, and their interactions with customers and clients mean that they are frequently under heightened scrutiny, requiring constant vigilance on their part. Drawing on insights from phenomenological writing on embodiment, specifically Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception, the analysis considers the ways in which intersections between masculinity, propriety and proximity are perceived and negotiated in intimate forms of labour, reflecting on instances when a touch becomes ‘too much’. It considers what these instances reveal to us about gendered experiences of embodiment within organizations and the importance of perception in understanding embodied negotiations of workplace intimacy.

Gendered tensions: Exploring student's resistance to communication instruction.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to draw from the authors’ experiences, as women teaching Communication in a College of Engineering and mechanical engineering students’ evaluations, to highlight student resistance to both practices and bodies deemed “feminine.”Design/methodology/approach – The authors examine how the masculine discipline of engineering might construct a learning environment that is incompatible with feminist ideals. This is illuminated when engineering students are required to learn communication skills from female instructors.Findings – The authors’ analysis suggests that students’ resistance to communication instruction is gendered. Students often constructed hierarchical relationships where communication was considered “soft” in relation to the “hard” science of engineering instead of integral to the discipline and profession. Students resisted by expressing a lack of utility of information, devaluing feedback and instruction, degrading communication teachers, and questioning the...

A femininity that ‘giveth and taketh away’ : The prosperity gospel and postfeminism in the neoliberal economy

This article explores how postfeminist and prosperity gospel discourses intersect in an organizational context to produce a particular ideal of feminine subjectivity that reproduces a neoliberal agenda. We focus on narratives written by female national vice presidents in a multi-national network marketing organization headquartered in America. Network marketing tends to attract a vast number of women who are enticed by grand messages of material and spiritual riches; however, such messages are often at odds with the precarious and uncertain working conditions. We contribute to gender and organization scholarship by introducing the concept of evangelical entrepreneurial femininity to explore the tensions and demands that are placed on women in an organizational context where postfeminism and prosperity gospel discourses intersect. In doing so, we question the expectations and constraints that many working women negotiate in this neoliberal age of alleged ‘freedom’ and ‘equality,’ and raise a number of concerns for feminist critique.

The limits of inclusion – stories from the margins of the Swedish police

This chapter explores gay and lesbian police officers’ stories of marginalization and the limits of inclusive diversity policies in the Swedish police. The analysis aims to go beyond the level of policy and formal training and consider mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization on the level of personal stories based on lived experience. Drawing on an interview study of gay and lesbian police officers in Sweden, this chapter argues that the limits of inclusion can be found in the stories told by these members. While the formal policy of the Swedish police does not set up any obstacles for inclusion of gays and lesbians, the stories told by the officers provide insight into other mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization. This analysis of the stories—which are divided into “old” stories from the 1980 and 1990s and “new” stories from the 2000s—indicates that explicit silencing and exclusion characterized the old stories, while the new stories were characterized by stigmatization, marginalization and an increase in voice.

(Re)Situating Communication in the Disciplines: Taking Gender into Account

Communication in the disciplines (CID) is a model of situated pedagogy that prepares students for the communication demands of their professional work. A defining feature of CID is its “situatedness.” Communication is meant to uphold, not disrupt, disciplinary norms surrounding communication outcomes, genres, and assessment. However, by upholding rather than critically examining and shifting disciplinary norms, CID runs the risk of being an unwitting ally in the maintenance of gendered inequities in the disciplines and professions. We argue that CID, as both situated and representative of contradiction, can highlight tensions internal to disciplinary activities, thus positioning CID to be an agent of expansion. We draw from feminist theory and socialization and genre research to show how CID instructors and instruction can facilitate engagement with the contradictions and tensions characterizing the CID classroom to promote a more inclusive community of practice.

The liminality of branding Interweaving discourses ‘making up’ a cultural intermediary occupation

This article explores how the occupation of branding and the work it encompasses are discursively constituted and ‘made up’. It starts with the premise that branding is a cultural intermediary occupation about whose norms and practices we cannot assume certainty, stability or homogeneity. The study illustrates how branding is comprised of multiple social and occupational discourses, namely, ‘creativity’, ‘discovery’, ‘business’ and ‘morality’. Rather than stand alone, these discourses dynamically interweave and intersect. Consequently, branding emerges as an occupation with distinct liminal conditions, being simultaneously about art, science, business and social relational work. Instead of moving towards stability, our findings suggest that branding is an intermediary occupation that sustains rather than discontinues liminality and that enduring liminality lends itself to the non-distinctiveness of the occupation. For branders, occupying a liminal occupational position implies various challenges but similarly scopes for flexibility and autonomy.