Organised Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Workplace Culture

Abstract

In earlier parts of this book we drew attention to the way in which restructuring involved redefining the qualities of staff members. This frequently involved rethinking the gendered, familial and sexualised properties of employees. In this chapter we explore more systematically how sexualised discourses were invoked in our organisations, and we use this material to take further our analysis of the relationship between the ‘gender paradigm’ and the ‘sexuality paradigm’, which we alluded to in Chapter 1. The former, the ‘gender paradigm’, emphasises the notion of a corporate patriarchy or systemic sets of relations of male dominance and female subordination within organisations, whilst the latter, the ‘sexuality paradigm’, focuses on localised and strategic deployment of power and sexuality through organisational discourses. There is a legacy of tension between these two approaches. Analyses of sexuality and organisations have been strongly influenced by Foucault and, consequently, have tended to emphasise sexuality in a way that appears to sideline or even displace the category of gender. Furthermore, some feminist writers remain strongly critical of the diffuse conceptualisation of power in the ‘sexuality paradigm’ (Walby, 1990; Adkins and Lury, 1996; Adkins, 1995).