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Postfeminism, Gender and Organization
Special Issue
Call for Papers
Editors: Yvonne Benschop, Radboud University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, y.benschop@fm.ru.nl; Patricia Lewis, University of Kent, UK, p.m.j.lewis@kent.ac.uk; Ruth Simpson, Brunel University, UK, R.Simpson@brunel.ac.uk.
This special issue seeks to insert postfeminism as a critical concept into understandings of gender work and organization. While the notion of postfeminism has been extensively investigated in cultural and media studies, it has yet to emerge substantially within gender and organization studies (hereafter GOS). This special issue therefore represents a first in the field. It is increasingly important to include postfeminism as a dominant cultural phenomenon in GOS for two reasons: first, because of its close connections to neoliberalism as a gendered and transnational set of relations and the significance for experiences and understandings of gender at work in different national and international contexts. In particular the shared emphasis on individualization found in understandings of postfeminism and neoliberalism (Beck, 1992, Giddens, 1991) - an understanding which underplays the role of social structures and places emphasis on the individual's capacity to shape their own destinies - demands attention in GOS. Second, because terms such as choice, opt-out, opt-in, merit, make-over - frequently used in relation to contemporary gender issues in GOS and drawn upon as justifications for the persistent inequalities that women experience in the world of work - share common (unacknowledged) postfeminist roots. Indeed, choice and merit are central to both postfeminism and neoliberalism with choice understood as the means by which individuals shape their lives and merit justifying the rewarding of those who make the "right" choices, while those who do not make the "right" choices are believed to "deservedly" fail.
Depicting what constitutes postfeminism is not a straightforward task and this reflects a lack of theoretical consistency in terms of how it is viewed. Thus, one of the aims of this special issue will be to explore how to theorise postfeminism within the national and international context of GOS. Populist accounts of postfeminism tend to be couched in terms of the demise of feminism and this can take a number of forms including progressive movement within feminism (from a prefeminist era to a feminist era to a postfeminist era), backlash and blaming of feminism, or feminist "success" in providing choice and opportunity to women. Whether positive or negative, all such populist accounts are underpinned by the assumption that feminism is no longer required (Projansky, 2001). Within the academy it is firstly, understood as a shift in feminist theory presenting it as the intersection of feminism with postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Here, postfeminism is understood in terms of an epistemological break in the wake of feminism's encounters with difference (Gill, 2007).
Alternatively, a second elucidation understands postfeminism as a cultural discursive strategy which responds to feminism. This second approach focuses on the way postfeminism is discursively produced through the intersections of a group of hegemonic discourses around gender, feminism and femininity (Dean, 2010; Gill, 2007; Lewis, 2014; McRobbie, 2009). Interestingly, these intersections can be linked to critiques of feminism which emerge not only from outside feminism but also from within. An early feminist backlash which Stacey (1986) labels as conservative pro-family feminism, notable for the radical feminist ancestry of some of its themes, provided a critique of the way feminist theory, particularly second wave liberal feminism, articulates a vocabulary which is anti-home asserting that women can only self-actualise if they leave home and traditional femininity behind. The emphasis on 'leaving home behind' set up a strong oppositional tension between feminism and the femininity associated with the domestic (Hollows, 2007). This denunciation of domestic femininity within liberal feminism mirrors the later denunciation of feminism and its associated public femininity within accounts of postfeminism. However such denunciations and the emphasis placed on the traditional hostility between second wave liberal feminism and traditional femininity conceals the complexities of their contemporary entanglement.
Recognising this complexity raises many key issues which we, as editors, hope this special issue will in different ways seek to address. In particular, we seek to explore the following: the cultural significance of the expressed desire to 'go back home' not as a return to the past but rather as a contemporary gendered phenomenon enacted by many women in senior organizational positions; the way in which feminism has 'bled' into conventional femininity creating new feminine subjectivities in the workplace and in the broader social context; how feminism may have been 'tamed' within the context of its intersection with femininity; the dominant position of liberal feminism in mainstream organizational scholarship and its co-existence with other feminist perspectives in organization studies – and how postfeminism fits in or connects to the variety of feminist perspectives within studies of organizations; and finally, the contestation that feminism is no longer required in the world of work.
Following the above, theoretical and theoretically grounded empirical papers will be welcome on the following (not exclusive) areas:
· Overlap between postfeminism, transnationalism and neoliberalism and implications for GOS
· New sexism and the repudiation of feminism(s) within the work context nationally and internationally
· Co-optation and "taming" of feminism(s) within the work context nationally and internationally
· The unproblematic role of merit within discourses and practices of postfeminism
· Options as discursively produced through notions of choice; how choice acts as an agent of power distribution within a postfeminist context.
· Retreatism (return to home) as a postfeminist practice and response to the demands of the postfeminist, neoliberal workplace
· Femininity within organizations; new feminine subjectivities and access to contemporary feminine subjectivities
· New masculine paradigms within a postfeminist context
· Postfeminist contradictions and complexities in understandings and experiences of work-based gender relations
· Retro-feminism, bodily feminism at work
Articles should be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gwo and conform to the author guidelines of Gender, Work and Organization. The normal length of a submitted article should be around 9,000 words. The deadline for submission of papers is 31 May 2015.
References
Beck, U. 1992: Risk society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Dean, J. 2010: Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Giddens, A. 1991: Modernity and Self- identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gill, R. 2007: Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10, 147-166.
Hollows, J. 2007: The feminist and the cook: Julia Child, Betty Friedan and domestic femininity. In E. Casey and L. Martens (eds.) Gender and Consumption. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Lewis, P. 2014: Postfeminism, femininities and organization studies: Exploring a new agenda, Organization Studies, doi:10.1177/0170840614539315
McRobbie, A. 2009: The Aftermath of Feminism. London: Sage.
Projansky, S. 2001: Watching Rape. New York: New York University Press.
Stacey, J. 1986: Are feminists afraid to leave home? The challenge of conservative pro-family feminism. In J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds.) What is Feminism? Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.