(Re)writing women in organization: Portraits of affliction, tales of resistances, hopes for living differently

Beavan, Katie

Abstract

(Re)Writing Women: A Call to Activism NOW!

This study argues that the time has come to DEMASCULINIZE our organizations and our Academy. As a qualitative study conducted in hypermasculine organizations it paints portraits of the HARM done to our bodies, our lives and our communities in obeying neoliberal demands, explicit and implicit, for 24/7 working. It reveals that our organizations still reproduce gendered systems of privilege and discrimination that isolate us as we speed up, faster and faster, to deliver more and more outputs. Women are subjugated. But this is a study of HOPE. It tells tales of resistances, where small sites of activism can spread quickly, where men and women can come together to create spaces of EQUALITY, ripping tears in patriarchy; spaces of COMMUNITY, GENEROSITY and LOVE; places where all DIFFERENCES are VALUED.

This is a thesis written from a woman’s body, defying the political, ethical and aesthetic constraints handed down from Academy’s masculine tradition. It is a scholarly, critical inquiry and a piece of embodied, ethical, activist research. It is an AESTHETIC work of POETRY and prose written and taken to STAGE, forging connections with audiences to evoke critical consciousness and action in their bodies. It is a work of passion and DESIRE; a feminine text written from MY BODY as a site of transgression. It is a CALL to FEMINISTS, men and women, to remember that feminism is about social-political change. Our gains are slender and are being erased. It is a call for AFFECTIVE FEMINIST SOLIDARITY in the world.

This academic work is written differently, to inspire other scholars to resist, explore, experiment and free themselves of shackles; to write from our bodies and take our writing out of the Academy to CHANGE the WORLD. An invocation to write vulnerably, to write gender differently, to use our sociological KNOWLEDGE and IMAGINATIONS to bridge the gulf between theory and action. It is a CALL to ARMS.

The time has come to create new FÉMININE SPACES in our Academy. This thesis is a call for all to write, using writing as a CATALYST for social change:
WOMEN’S WRITING to REWRITE WOMEN. I nail my FEMINIST THESES to the doors of the Academy of Organization Studies.

A Suffragette, 2018

Citation

Beavan, K. (Re)writing women in organization: Portraits of affliction, tales of resistances, hopes for living differently. (Thesis). University of the West of England. Retrieved from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/806088

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 5, 2019
• Keywords: activism, Cixous, feminine spaces, feminine writing, organizations, performative writing, social change
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/806088
• Award Date: Sep 25, 2018