Abstract
Although some have declared that queer theory has run its course (Warner, 2012), it is only just emerging in Management and Organization Studies (MOS). In Queer business: Queering organization sexualities, Nick Rumens inspires us to consider how queer theory can be mobilized, even revitalized, in organization studies to “problematize, rupture and reconfigure the field of norms” (p. 1) that constitute organization sexualities. Rumens makes a case for the persistence of queer theory as a vital, vibrant mode of critique that can (and must) reinvent itself by taking stock of the “queer stirrings” (p. 1) in MOS scholarship and the myriad possibilities for queering organizational studies.
Rumens asserts that the power of queer theory to disrupt and destabilize normative logics comes from its queer location. Organizational studies is dominated by postpositivist theoretical and methodological commitments, leaving queer theory dancing at the fringes of MOS scholarship because of its refusal to “truck with improving organizational efficiency and performance” (p. 9). Drawing on his own subjectivity as a gay male working in business and management schools, Rumens shares his anger and exhaustion from “negotiating the heteronormativity of organizational life within a UK business school” (p. 9), making a case for thinking queerly about organizing by underscoring the need for more hospitable organizations that support minority subjects in having “livable” lives (Butler, 2004).
Rumens employs the acronym LGBT+ as a way to refer to the “myriad genders and sexualities” (p. 12) (re)signifying as queer subjectivities (e.g. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, genderqueer). In doing so, he appears trapped in an identity-based essentialism that at times collapses the experience of queerness under an acronym often criticized for its underrepresentation or erasure of trans and bisexual subjectivities. Rumens acknowledges yet never quite overcomes the difficulty of discussing categorized sexualities and genders within the anti-categorical, slippery, and destabilizing terrain of queer theory.
Throughout Queer business, the author explores the various productivities of queer as “noun, adjective and verb” (p. 20). Following the evolution of queer connotations (e.g. from strange, to slur, to politic), Rumens argues that part of the subversive value, and political weight, of queer is in its affective resonance as a “five-letter word” (p. 20). Queer can be an identity (“I am queer”) or a description (“queer space,” ‘queer methods’), however, Rumens primarily explores queering as an action. He defines queering as “a discursive strategy that aims to deconstruct…heteronormativity, often by re-reading culture in ways that expose its normative logics” (p. 23). Rumens resists securing queer theory to any singular definition, instead drawing attention to the bibliographic shape of queer scholarship. The central question driving Queer business engages not the definition of queer theory, but instead its applied and scholarly utility. For Rumens, queer(ing) perspectives on OMS will support scholars in interrogating the norms that “enable and constrain the constitution of LGBT+sexualities and genders at work” (p. 30) in order to facilitate more hospitable and just organizations.
The book unfolds in seven chapters, from an introduction of queer theory to agenda-setting arguments for MOS. Chapter 1 begins with an overview of queer theory and politics. Leading queer theorists (e.g. Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Michael Warner) feature prominently in this chapter as Rumens weaves together histories of feminism, poststructuralism, and the gay liberation movement that laid the groundwork for a queer politics of subjectivity and transformation. Rumens also traces political movements toward conservatism during the 1980s in the United States and the United Kingdom, to underscore how the reversal of progress for lesbian and gay rights led to the emergence of a more radical, queer movement. During the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s, political activism related to LGBT rights evolved from a politics of homogeneity (“we’re just like everyone else”) toward a “politics of difference” (p. 19), a strategy engineered to account for the diversity of lived experiences of gender and sexual minorities. Queer theory’s commitments to performativity, normativity (including hetero- and homo-), and anti-essentialism are each explored briefly to illustrate the queer sensibilities that could be applied to researching organizational sexualities. Queer theory is commonly critiqued for its propensity toward highfaluting, inaccessible writing understood only by intellectual elites; in contrast, Rumens’ first chapter is simultaneously in-depth and concise; broad and manageable; rigorous and accessible. As such, this chapter is indispensable as an introduction to queer theory and its emergence in academic and social contexts.
In Chapters 2 and 3, Rumens engages an extensive literature review of organization and sexuality research OMS, as well as its possibilities in business and management schools. Chapter 2 is organized thematically, and Rumens synthesizes OMS research on sexual harassment, sexual relations, sexualized labor, heteronormativity at work, and LGBT+ organizational studies. The literature review supports Rumens’ argument that “organizations have a hand in constructing sexuality, and that sexuality constructs organizations” (Rumens, 2018: 39). These chapters provide the first comprehensive review of organizational sexualities in conversation with queer theory, making it a must-read for organizational scholars interested in gender, sexuality, power, and/or critical organizational studies. Ultimately, Rumens calls for queering (verb) of OMS scholarship in order to breathe new life into it. Here, he turns toward business and management schools (Chapter 3) as an example of how queer(ing) organizations would produce interesting critical and queer theories and also disrupt the normative logics of heteronormativity and cisnormativity running rampant (and often unchecked) in organizations and academic departments that are currently inhospitable to queerness and difference.
The deployment of queer theory—the how to queer research and organizations—is presented in Chapter 4 as Rumens explores queering methodology and research methods. Critiques of queer theory often include its penchant for the theoretical (Browne and Nash, 2010), but Queer business throws that into sharp relief in its recounting of possibilities to deploy queer theory methodologically, including scavenger methodology (Halberstam, 1998), subversive ethnography (Plummer, 2011), and queer reflexivity (McDonald, 2013, 2016).
One of the strongest contributions is Rumens’ articulation of “anti-narrative interviewing as a research method” (p. 99; see also Riach et al., 2016), a mobilization of Butler’s (2004) process of “undoing” (Rumens, 2018: 98). In the Butlerian sense, narrative is performative because the telling of a story is not representational, but instead constitutive. When we give an account of our own selves and subjectivities, that act of telling constitutes the “self.” Rumens articulates anti-narrative interviewing as an example of queering the interviewing process that refuses a cohesive, coherent narrative of organizations and subjectivities and considers the performativity of interview narratives in order to “undo” them. Rumens provides examples through previous research conducted with co-authors (see Riach et al., 2014) on older LGBT people in the workplace. Participants reflected on aspects of themselves visually by drawing a Venn diagram, and then were encouraged to reflect upon the drawings to “articulate disruptions, tensions and negotiations within their narratives” (p. 102). This anti-interview method disrupted the notion of linearity and coherence, opening space for reflexive undoing of subjectivity. Undoing is crucial for Rumens because it resists “fixing” (p. 107) research participants in categories and subject positions, and resists normative logics embedded in our methodological assumptions. Imperative to queering methods, then, is a commitment to continually queering the practices of data collection and analysis in order to avoid normalizing, even standardizing, our practices into “queer orthodoxies” (see Browne and Nash, 2010).
The final chapters of Queer business address this orthodoxy directly by moving in new directions with queer OMS scholarship. Chapter 5 urges us to (re)consider terms like inclusion and diversity to avoid the trap of queer liberalism that positions happiness as merely “securing the accoutrements of a heterosexual life” (p. 113), including monogamous marriage, adoption rights, and mortgages. The risk of queer orthodoxy here is that it produces a queer liberalism that reifies, rather than subverts, cisheteronormative logics (Ahmed, 2010; Eng, 2010), thus de-coupling queer from “antinormativity and social transformation” (Rumens, 2018: 116). Furthermore, following Jasbir K. Puar’s (2007) work on homonationalism, “queerness is brought to bear to meet the liberal demands of a nation state” (p. 117) that colonizes through pinkwashing, the branding of one country as liberal or progressive in order to showcase another country as repressed and in need of intervention from the empire. Rumens follows Lisa Duggan’s (2002) work on homonormativity to articulate the relationship between neoliberalism and palatable queerness in order to explore how organizations and organizing can reproduce “gay-friendly forms of heteronormativity” (Rumens, 2018: 119).
The pull of heteronormativity is further explored in Chapter 6, and Rumens asserts the crucial difference between heterosexuality (sexual orientation) and heteronormativity (normative cultural logic) and underscores the importance of studying heterosexuality and its relationship (and independence) with heteronormativity so that we might understand how each “can be resisted, resignified and dismantled” (p. 139). The move toward studying heterosexuality is in itself a queer move, as most queer scholarship focuses on queer subjects, but very little on how heterosexuality might be queered. Included is a history of heterosexuality that should not be taken for granted, for the very practice of writing the history of heterosexuality in this chapter queerly destabilizes the “norm” of heterosexuality, exposing it as a social and cultural construct. Rumens explores possibilities for attending to heterosexuality through the lens of queer theory, which he argues must include coalition work with race, ethnicity, age, and class.
This call for future work is ultimately what Queer business is all about. Chapter 7, “The Future is Queer?” (p. 161), grapples with the question of queer futurity best represented in the tensions between Lee Edelman’s (2004) No future and Jose Estaban Munoz’s (2009) Cruising utopia. Rumens explores each scholars’ account of the (lack of) future, ultimately leaving behind Edelman’s antisocial thesis to align himself with Muñoz’s queer horizon infused with hope and desire for a queerer world. He takes up the notion of queer world-making by drawing on his previous research on gay men’s friendships in the workplace, articulating a queer future in organizational contexts as constituted by workplace relationality. Here, Rumens uses the term relationality not in the sense of relational ontology, but rather in relating or relationshipping. Crucial to his argument is that these personal interactions between friends at work serve to make work more “livable,” and also challenge structural and organizational logics. Centering Butler’s (2004) ethics of non-violence, Rumens draws from interview data to illustrate how vulnerability between men in gay/straight workplace friendships disrupts norms of hetero-masculinity and allows us to seek queerer, nonnormative futures.
Queer business insists upon the expanding possibilities open to us by queering theories and methods in our research on organizational sexualities. Although he rightly asserts that queer theory can be applied to any context (not just sexualities), this book primarily focuses on sexuality and as such does not exemplify how to queer (verb) research areas not directly related to queer subjects (noun). With some exceptions, the examples used in this book primarily come from the United States or the United Kingdom and as such, the exploration of queer and queer theory tends toward a Western lens. In addition, although Rumens attends to queer of color critiques throughout the literature reviews, there is no attention paid to how queer of color scholars critique the whiteness of the word itself, preferencing to use the term “quare studies” instead (Johnson, 2001) that accommodates sexualities as racialized and classed. Given the dearth of scholarship on race and organizational scholarship (Ashcraft and Allen, 2003), moving forward with queer(ing) OMS must include thinking at the intersections of race, ability (e.g. crip theory), and class.
Queer business is a crucial read for all scholars and practitioners interested in nonnormative organizing practices, queer theories, and queer methodologies. Rumens’ writing is accessible, interweaving theories, methods, and research examples that bring the notion of queering to life as a practice and politics. This book shows how queer theory can continue to have multiple lives, and in doing so, makes the at-times inhospitable space of academia and organizational life a bit more livable. Indeed, the very existence of this book as a published work hints at a queer(er) horizon.