Three Women. A Kiss. A Life. On the Queer Writing of Time in Organization

Abstract

In this paper, a queer approach to feminine writing is related to the development of new female subject positions through conceiving of other understandings of time. To conceptualize this relationship, the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham is analysed and interpreted as a queer story of how women — writing, reading and enacting a novel — acquire an opening to a life that breaks with the heteronormative conception of time. This one‐day novel that interweaves the lives of three women in a multiple assemblage offers the ‘formula’ of the triptych, which can be considered a primary form of life as multiplicity. Interconnecting the writings of Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the cartographic analysis zooms in on three aspects of time by addressing respectively the motifs of the party, the kiss and the day: time as pause, time as exquisite moment and time as affect. By re‐establishing the relationship between writing, time and the becoming‐woman of life, the paper aims to indicate that queer writing can help to re‐imagine new possibilities for (work) life.

A Critical Plot Twist: Changing Characters and Foreshadowing the Future of Organizational Storytelling

“…One study of men who had taken parental leave shows that even though support for male parental leave was formally sanctioned by legislation, the symbolic gender order is an ingrained organizational narrative that constitutes a significant informal barrier that has also to be overcome (Murgia and Poggio 2009). Several studies of various types of fictional narratives emphasize the potential for creative storytelling to explore the 'shadow sides of organizations' that may not be given full expression in non-fictional experience, including female experience (Rippin 2015), queer identity (Steyaert 2015) and other topics important in critical management education (Śliwa et al 2015). Rhodes and Brown (2005a) conclude their review by revisiting the tension between science and story that they identify at the outset of their study.…”

Writing the doctoral thesis differently

“…Consequently, most doctoral writing continues to emulate a homogenised doctoral student who is white (like me), who is masculine (unlike me), who is straight (unlike me) and who conducts research in a positivist way (unlike me). Following a queer critique, however, emphasises that instead of fixing our doctoral writing as hierarchical, linear and rooted, we can think of our writing as a multiplicity and along multiple overlapping and divergent axes (Steyaert, 2015).…”

Adorno’s grey, Taussig’s blue: Colour, organization and critical affect

“…Paving the way for our attempt at attending to colour as affective force, a number of studies have been dedicated to the affective constitution and destabilization of organized settings, paying particular attention "to phenomena that ordinarily and routinely get suppressed or marginalized in studies of organization" (O'Doherty, 2008: 542). These studies have touched upon the atmospheric constitution of organization (Borch, 2010), where affective blurring continuously takes place (O'Doherty, 2008); where affect works through the organization and 'queering' of time (Steyaert, 2015); where 'dark' affects mess up the everyday organization of public space (Beyes, 2010); and where the uncanny disturbs and reconfigures organizational settings (Beyes and Steyaert, 2013) just as much as the absent presence of love invites reconsiderations of gendered organizational experience (Vachhani, 2015). Methodologically, such work has been connected to affective cartographies of organizational change (Lohmann and Steyaert, 2006), psycho-geographies of city-organization (Beyes and Steyaert, 2013;O'Doherty, 2013) and organizational geographies in slow motion (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012).…”

“…While this kind of work aims to "give (...) colour to the various affects, intensities and rhythms" (Steyaert, 2015: 164; our emphasis) of organization, the ubiquitous world of colour itself is strangely absent from studies of organizational affect. But then, perhaps this neglect is less strange than it might appear.…”