Call for papers : White Feminisms and Organisation Studies: 'Inhabiting the critique'(Ahmed, 2004)
Gender, Work & Organization, 11th Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference, 24thto 26thJune 2020
In this call for papers we seek to bring feminist organisational studies in dialogue with critical whiteness, critical race, Indigenous, anti-racist and postcolonial theories to reflect critically on white feminism. By 'white feminism', we draw on a term developed by feminists of colour which critiques forms of feminist theorising and political projects which come from, and universalise, a white perspective (Aziz, 1992 cited Jonsson, 2014). White feminism takes white women as its subjects, erases the racism in white feminism and ignores, or co-opts, the thinking and experience of women of colour. As a result, white feminism reproduces racism, oppression, and white feminine privilege. Women of colour and Indigenous scholars emphasise that one key consequence of this persistent and profound neglect is that white feminists assume the universality of a feminist sisterhood, and gate-keep feminism as a project which belongs to white women (Ahmed, 2019; Jonsson, 2016). In so doing white feminists ignore the many ways in which white women benefit from whiteness (Holvino, 2010). Indeed, white women's desire for innocence means they/we forget their/our complicity in white domination (Fellows & Razack, 1998; Liu and Baker, 2016; Moon, 1999; Moreton-Robinson, 2000). White feminism is the effect of white feminists avoiding analysing white femininity as racialised; understanding white feminist politics in the context of white supremacy and colonialism; and willfully ignoring how 'appropriate' femininity is entangled with performing idealised whiteness (Daniels, 2015; Ferreday, 2017; Jonsson, 2014). What's important here is a focus on gendered whiteness and racism specific to feminism, and connected to white supremacy, slavery and colonialism - what Terese Jonsson (2016) calls 'white feminist racism'.
It is vital to take account of the sustained history of women of colour, Islamic feminists and Indigenous women in challenging and confronting white feminists and feminisms on a range of counts: excluding women of colour's lives, theories and problems; marginalising faith; and ignoring our/white feminists' collusion in racism, imperialism and colonialism (for instance see Amos, Lewis, Mama & Parmar, 1984; Carby, 1982; hooks, 2000; Mahmood, 2011; Moreton-Robinson, 2000).
What this scholarship shows us is that white feminism and white femininity vary across historical, colonial, and national contexts. Accordingly, any consideration of white feminism must attend carefully to positionality and location in time and place, and the specificity of femininity and gendered and racialised power relations. In this vein, Australian Indigenous scholars insist that Australian white feminism ignores how white women's race privilege is tied to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Huggins, 1994; Moreton-Robinson, 2000). In Aotearoa New Zealand, indigenous Māori women have emphasised the importance of an epistemology based on a Māori world view, a mana wahine perspective, as the basis for an encounter with feminism which validates matauranga wahine (Māori women's knowledges) (Jenkins and Pihama, 2001; Simmonds, 2001).
In this stream, we are interested in papers that examine white feminism and white feminist racism in the academy, and in other organisational contexts. In the academy, white feminism erases racial specificity, diminishes the research of women of colour, proclaims white innocence and injury and 'hoards' academic resources, 'asset–stripping' the academic achievements of women of colour (Tomlinson, 2019). Indeed, even when white feminism claims to be anti-racist, it can reproduce whiteness (Moreton-Robinson, 2000). This is particularly stark in the ways that white feminism has 'whitened' the Black feminist anti-racist concept and politics of intersectionality (Bilge, 2015; Liu, 2018). Moreover, women of colour have stressed the toll they experience in negotiating academic white feminism (Johnson, 2019). As Black British feminist Heidi Mirza explains: 'The sheer effort to raise the racial consciousness of white feminists since 1970s through engendering critical self-reflection and the recognition of racism in white feminist theorizing has so often left us 'angry', exhausted and in need of self-recovery' (2015:5).
Mainstream organisation studies to date has marginalised race, racism and whiteness. In contrast, Stella Nkomo has argued for over 25 years that 'race has been present all along in organisations' and that we can put our attention to race as an analytical category for any organisational topic (1992: 488). And although there is an emergent literature in feminist organisation studies on whiteness (e.g., Grimes, 2002; Hunter, Swan, and Grimes, 2010; Liu and Baker, 2016; Liu & Pechenkina, 2016; MacAlpine & Marsh, 2005; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014; Samaluk, 2014); less attention has been given specifically to white feminism and white femininities (see Swan, 2010, 2018). For instance, Evangelina Holvino insists that 'affluent white women...have openly exploited women of colour as domestic workers and organizational assistants', deploying racial and class privilege to diminish their social position and options (2010: 254). Mirza (2015) asks how the white feminist preoccupation with (white) gender equality, precarious careers, work-life balance, success, leadership and power in male dominated boardrooms, connect with issues facing women of colour such as racist policing, Islamaphobic state surveillance, growing incarceration, and forced migration.
But we acknowledge it is not an easy project for we/white feminists to interrogate white feminism and white feminist racism. Thus, we subtitle this call 'Inhabiting the Critique', after Sara Ahmed (2004). By this, Ahmed means that white feminists need to listen to their/our racism and complicity in colonialism rather moving on and away from hearing about racism and white supremacy. She notes that white people often ask what we/they can do when hearing about our/their complicity which acts as a defence and as a 'premature impulse' to make things better. There are therefore potential problems such that our stream could easily encourage white racist confessionals, making it a space which does not address racism; or simply reproduce the idea that white feminists can transcend whiteness or claim anti-racism as a source of white pride and cultural distinction (Ahmed, 2004). Indeed, as Akane Kanai (2019) notes, white feminists sometimes try to renounce 'bad' white feminism by declaring themselves 'good' 'intersectional' white feminists, and individualising what is actually a systemic form of power. It is crucial, as Terese Jonsson (2014) stresses, that when we /white feminists draw on the concept of white feminism or other work by feminists of colour, we acknowledge the feminists of colour who have developed it, and their continued exclusion. Otherwise we are appropriating their work and assimilating it into white-dominated academia, while keeping them invisible and reproducing racial hierarchies. Accordingly, we call for a critical engagement with white feminism as academics working within white-dominated academic institutions, and as actual or potential anti-racist scholar-activists. Our aim is to find ways to transform feminism in organisational studies and build anti-racist scholarship and practice which challenges the structures that reproduce normative whiteness (Johnson, 2019). Accordingly, we will chair the stream strictly according to anti-racist pedagogical principles.
Indicative Topics
We call for papers which address organisational studies of white feminism, and/or white feminism in academia. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
White feminism and white feminist racism in academia
- Critiques of white feminism in the academy from critical race theory, decolonising theory and activism, and intersectionality theory, which challenge and extend organisational studies
- Critical evaluations and practices of white allyship in organisational and academic feminisms
- How feminist methodologies, theories, and concepts including 'intersectionality' diminish women of colour's scholarship and theorising and reproduce racism and exclusion
- How reviewing, editing, publishing and citational practices marginalise and appropriate writing by Indigenous scholars and scholars of colour and reproducethe institutional whiteness of British academia and publishing. How is white feminism reproduced in organisation studies' journals and books? How do practices of reading, arguing and writing protect white feminist racism?
- How white feminists co-opt and use anti-racist scholarship by women of colour to centre whiteness and benefit white feminists, not to transform white feminism (Mirza, 2015).
Organisational studies of white feminism and white feminist racism
- How white women's rights and freedoms in organisations are often gained on the backs of women of colour (Holvino, 2010; Jonsson, 2014)
- How white women racially oppress women of colour at work
- How organisational studies' concepts and central categories such as emotional labour, aesthetic labour, body work etc. would be reconfigured through the critiques of white feminism
- How white feminism in organisations shifts white women into positions of privilege while marginalising women of colour and Indigenous women
- Critical evaluations of case studies of white feminist activisms such as Sandberg's Lean inand the white MeToo movement (Daniels, 2016)
- How white women reproduce micro-aggressions in the workplace or the university and their effects on and resistances by women of colour
- White feminism and HRM, marketing and PR, and coaching (see for instance, Swan, 2017)
- White femininities and practices of equality, diversity, and inclusion
- How whiteness works through institutional habits and bodily orientations to enable white women, and to constrain minoritised others (Ahmed, 2004)
- How white feminism and white femininities collude with patriarchy and heteronormativity in organisations
- How white feminists and feminism defend against critique and protect white femininity: White tears, white denial, white confessionals, white ignorance, white fragility, white rage, white guilt, the performance of vulnerability (Lewis & Hemmings, 2019)
- Ways to interrupt, contest and destabilise white femininities and white feminism in organisations
- Feminist and women-dominated organisations, occupations and professions and encounters with/reproductions of racism.
For stream enquiries please contact: e.swan@sussex.ac.uk
Submission of papers:
Abstracts of approximately 500 words (submitted direct to stream leaders, ONE page, WORD NOT PDF, single spaced, excluding any references, no headers, footers or track changes) are invited by Friday 1st November 2019.
Decisions on acceptance of abstracts will be made by stream leaders within one month and communicated to authors by Monday 2nd December 2019.
All contributions will be independently refereed.
Abstracts should include FULL contact details, including name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address.
Abstracts should be emailed to: e.swan@sussex.ac.uk
Stream Convenors:
CONVENORS
Deborah Jones is an Associate Professor in the School of Management, Victoria University of Wellington, and she is a Pākehā feminist researcher on working lives in terms of gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality.
Deirdre Tedmanson is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia and her research focuses on Indigenous policy, entrepreneurship, whiteness, postcolonial theory and critical management studies.
Elaine Swan is a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex Business School where she researches food, race and gender; critical diversity studies; and 'psy' practices in the workplace drawing on critical race feminist theories and critical whiteness studies.
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