This girl’s life: An autoethnography

Abstract

This essay seeks to add to a growing awareness of transgender lives and narratives in management and organisational studies. It presents an often visceral and emotive autoethnographical account of the experience of being a non-binary transsexual in the United Kingdom to question whether it is possible to think gender without invoking the heterosexual matrix and being held to account by it. It also asks what may need to be done so that the abject and marginalised in society may have liveable lives rather than an otherwise unliveable life resulting from that matrix. It argues that transgender is often conflated in management research theoretically as queer or queer's evil twin where the latter concept reduces trans lives to rigid, polarised positions in the matrix and stereotypes. The essay concludes by asking an open question, how we may organise so as to make lives liveable?

My dysphoria blues: Or why I cannot write an autoethnography

“…In a memoir, we may carry our past with us not as something we already understand, have learnt from and so directs our steps along the correct path in life but instead as memories that help orientate us towards and suggest possible futures (Ahmed, 2006). It is here, I would suggest, that we might begin to find my counter narrative to transition:My mum tells me that I chose to wear my sister’s clothes aged 4 (O’Shea, 2018). A photo of me aged 15 – pink Mohican, ripped CRASS t-shirt, DMs and a black skirt.…”

“…Since Brewis et al (1997) first wrote in a management and organisational context about transgender folk, there remain very few accounts of us folk in managerial and organisational settings. Those that exist allegorise (Brewis et al, 1997; Pullen et al, 2017; Pullen and Rhodes, 2013), or provide qualitative empirical examples ranging from those where a researcher tells our stories (Muhr et al, 2015; Muhr and Sullivan, 2013; Schilt, 2006; Schilt and Connell, 2007; Schilt and Westbrook, 2009) to self-reflexive accounts (O’Shea, 2016, 2018; Thanem, 2011; Thanem and Knights, 2012; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015). This polyphony of methodological concerns and understandings present transgender as a polyseme but where it is not always evident which transgender folk are represented by the stories told.…”

Working at gender? An autoethnography

“…There is a growing body of work in management and related areas that concentrates on the experience of trans folk at work (Connell, 2010;Knights & Thanem, 2011;Muhr & Sullivan, 2013;Schilt, 2006;Schilt & Connell, 2007) and in society generally (O'Shea, 2018 and2019a). I however wish to consider our transgender 'work' in broader terms as the effort directed towards a specific project of having a liveable life (Scheman, 1997.…”

Living the PhD journey

“…Sara could easily have explored her personal encounters by herself through autoethnographic accounts (e.g. Awasthy, 2015;Hearn, 2003;O'Shea, 2018). The motivation for using collective biography is that we, as a collective of authors, want to dive into and explore the affective implications of the fact of the belly.…”