Feminist social movements and whistleblowing disclosures: Ireland's Women of Honour

Abstract

Feminist social movements based on workers disclosing sexual harassment and sexual violence have had a dramatic impact on workplaces worldwide. But what are the specific dynamics shaping organizations founded on acts of disclosure? Organizational whistleblowing research has overlooked this topic, while literature on feminist social movements has not, to date, focused on whistleblowing disclosure as a shared experience prompting collective action. In this article I address these lacunae. I isolate disclosure‐based feminist movements (DFMs) as a specific, and important, organizational form, and I draw on relevant insights from whistleblowing theory to shed light on the dynamics therein. I find that first, DFMs are founded on a distinct kind of whistleblowing where members speak out about personally‐experienced embodied violence. Second, movements are galvanized through affective connections formed through the sharing of such experiences, and third, the perceived credibility of individual disclosures are uniquely enhanced through the salience emerging from collective speaking. Extant whistleblowing theory—and literature on feminist social movements—fails to account for organizations based upon embodied and collective experiences of disclosure. In this article a novel theoretical framing based on feminist theory is developed, emphasizing embodied, affective forms of parrhesia involving collective salience that counters whistleblower reprisal. Ideas are illustrated throughout with insights from an exemplar case within the worldwide military #MeToo movement: Ireland's Women of Honour. Contributions for scholarship on feminist social movements and organizational whistleblowing conclude the article alongside insights for practice.

Feminism and social movements: Notes on hope and despair

“…In a climate of capitalism run rampant and a perpetually shrinking commons, some sought insights from feminist critical geography (e.g., Rendell, 2016) to demonstrate how bodies and spaces intertwine to resist the extractivist practices of large corporations (see Daskalaki & Fotaki, 2023). Similarly, restrictive and, often, oppressive public spaces led some to draw on feminist social justice theories (e.g., Fraser, 2000) to surface gendered dynamics within broader movements (see Ourahmoune & Jurdi, 2023) as well as the role of ‘speaking out’ for enacting feminist movements (see Kenny, 2023). Below we explore these contributions in more depth through themes that surfaced as important.…”

Organizing vulnerability exploring Judith Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability to study organizations

“…Most of the studies in feminist MOS use it to describe "vulnerable groups" without defining what vulnerable in this context means (cf. Clavijo, 2020;Durbin et al, 2017;Kenny, 2023). To close this gap, I propose to use the theorization and conceptualization of vulnerability by Judith Butler (2016Butler ( , 2009.…”