CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A SPECIAL ISSUE OF GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
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
gwo.journal@mngt.keele.ac.uk Please contact the guest
editors if you wish to discuss an idea or proposal for a paper. Email
Alison on
aml500@york.ac.uk or David on
d.knights@mngt.keele.ac.uk.
For submission guidelines please consult the Gender, Work and
Organization Journal at:
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0968-6673