Performance and Performativity: Undoing Fictions of Women Business Owners

Abstract

This article explores the representation of women small business owners in three contemporary novels; Chocolat, The Shipping News and Back When We Were Grownups. The primary contribution is to demonstrate how fiction can both challenge and collude in dominant constructions of entrepreneurship, which is more generally gendered as male and masculine. Judith Butler's thinking on performativity with regard to gender and sexual desire is applied to women's identities and extended to include their behaviour as entrepreneurs. The article demonstrates that these novels both 'do' and 'undo' gender and business ownership. They portray women who are successful in business while displaying culturally accepted norms of femininity but who are set apart from other female characters. However, their partial and conflictual identification with norms of gender and entrepreneurship could lead a reader to question those norms and through the undoing of the protagonists, the novels offer alternative performances and performativities of doing gender and of doing business.Butler's body of work is considerable and her questioning of the formation of identities and subjectivities does not progress in a linear fashion but, rather, UNDOING FICTIONS 419

Where is Queer Theory in Organizational Studies?

“…However, despite being applied to different themes many of these works still use queer theory to study aspects of gender and sexuality in friendship, entrepreneurship, leadership and space [51][52][53]. Research about race, class, ethnicity and the body is marginal in studies that use queer theory concepts and need to be more developed by organizational researchers.…”

Public narratives of female entrepreneurship: fairy tale or fact?

“…Essers and Benschop (2007) put forward three strategies in relation to the crafting of a gendered entrepreneurial identity by women: the claiming of femininity (often as dictated by cultural norms); denouncing expectations relating to gender; or resisting the masculine connotation of entrepreneurship by disconnecting it from masculinity. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the discourse of 'womanhood' is at odds to that of entrepreneurship (Diaz Garcia & Welter 2013) and that women can opt to support the status quo by 'doing' or challenge it by 're-doing' gender in relation to entrepreneurship (Phillips & Knowles 2012).…”

A Teoria Queer e os Estudos Organizacionais: Revisando Conceitos sobre Identidade

“…A principal uso da teoria queer em queering as categorias de gênero e sexualidade demonstra a possibilidade e a capacidade dela de confrontar outras categorias de identidades, tais como gerente, trabalhador e empreendedor (Lee et al, 2008;Phillips & Knowles, 2012). Conceitos de performatividade e performance são úteis para se entender todas as formas de construção identitária e abrem um caminho interessante para se explorar identidades e identificação não apenas relacionadas a gênero e sexualidade, mas, inclusive, a identidades ocupacionais e corporativas (Phillips & Knowles, 2012).…”