EXPRESS: Becoming visible: Uncovering hidden entanglements of power, performativity and becoming subjectivities in a global bank

This paper explores entanglements and flows of power, performativity and related becoming subjectivities, in a rich thicket of lived experience in a global bank. The inquiry focuses on an affective auto/ethnographic field text of a mundane, cross-continent, telephone meeting between a senior executive colleague and myself. Experimenting with post-qualitative, transversal, feminist inquiry ‘I’ deliberately plug into multiple, criss-crossing, philosophical concepts of gendered power, performativity and subjectivity. ‘I’ playfully–vulnerably assay with new ways of doing processual organizational research and making knowing–as–action, including with potential readers. ‘I’ write differently, aiming to enact and exemplify the post-qualitative organization studies terrain as unsettled, unsettling and unpredictable. In a processual, abductive interpretation of my field text ‘I’ uncover agential subjectivities emerging from unconscious affective entanglements travelling across continents and disjunctive temporalities and between human and non-human entities. ‘I’ conclude by reflecting on the contributions of my paper and the implications of this inquiry for my practice as an organization studies practitioner–researcher.

Integrating intersectionality into autonomy: Reflections on feminist bioethics and egg freezing

The field of bioethics struggles with the complexity of diversity and power differences. ‘Intersectionality in Clinical Medicine: The Need for a Conceptual Framework’ (Wilson et al., 2019) and its accompanying commentaries, though inventive and thought-provoking, overlook key principles of biomedical ethics. In this paper, I reflect on the debate and consider how an intersectional approach could inform normative theorizing. Traditional principlist reasoning leads to serious problems when we are trying to deal with the complexities of intersectionality, and this is especially true if we look at the principle of autonomy. I develop the idea that intersectionality is more in line with feminist inquiry in bioethics that attempts to reconfigure autonomy. However, feminist critiques of autonomy often remain less than thoroughly engaged with intersectionality. The case of social egg freezing is used to further support this claim. By foregrounding an intersectional approach to the existing relational autonomy claims in this debate, the complicated relational and justice concerns of reproduction are better brought into focus.

Respond and Resolve: A Critical Feminist Inquiry for Technologies of Sexual Governance

From higher education to workplaces, institutions are increasingly adopting data-driven and semiautomated technologies to facilitate, manage, and arbitrate sexual affairs. These largely US-based systems, which I term “technologies of sexual governance,” are encoded with and reify particular ideologies about sexual (mis)conduct, and thus call for a critical feminist inquiry about their cultural, political, and moral implications for advancing a feminist sexual politics. Drawing from Halley et al.’s “governance feminism” framework, this article makes the case that a critical feminist inquiry into technologies of sexual governance must take into account the co-constitutive nature of feminist sexual politics and technology. Specifically, I argue that critical inquiries must begin by interrogating which feminist ideologies about sex and power gain purchase with and through particular computational logics and form. To demonstrate this approach, I offer two ways of reading feminist scholarly and popular responses to “antirape technologies” that capture both readings’ shortcomings, and I propose a third approach that captures the cultural work that particular feminist ideologies and technologies mutually perform. This article concludes by demonstrating how the third approach can advance a feminist analysis of workplace misconduct management softwares.

Duoethnography: A Polytheoretical Approach to (Re)Storing, (Re)Storying the Meanings That One Gives

This chapter summarizes the advancement of duoethnography throughout its fifteen-year history, employing examples from a variety of topics in education and social justice to provide a wide range of approaches that one may take when conducting a duoethnography. A checklist articulates what its cofounders consider the core elements of duoethnographies, additional features that may or may not be employed and how some studies purporting to be duoethnographies may not be so. The chapter indicates connections between duoethnography and a number of methodological concepts including the third space, the problematics of representation, feminist inquiry, and critical theory using published examples by several duoethnographers.

Challenging Misogyny on and off the Pitch: Analysis of Selected Sports Movies

Purpose: The present study is an attempt to analyze selected sports movies with reference to discrimination and misogyny against sportswomen. The aim is to explore how Indian sportswomen face misogyny and discrimination in sport institutions and society at large. Approach/Methodology/Design: The study is based on thematic analysis to destabilize the notion that sports are the sole realm of men alone. Feminist film theory is also used in the analysis of the movies. Two movies were selected; Chak de! India (2007) and Dil bole Hadippa! (2009). Findings: The results of the analysis indicate that these movies despite having their own drawbacks exhort that society cannot deny women equal rights of participation and opportunity in sports. Both of the movies project their protagonists struggling to achieve success in sports. It is revealed that despite the progress that has been achieved in sports, misogyny is deep-rooted in sport institutions. Practical Implications: The paper throws light on various types of barriers, socio-cultural, biological and psychological, which women players have to cross, in addition to dealing with a bizarre and weird kind of treatment which their male counterparts do not normally confront. It depicts how family pressures and restrictions, cultural inhibitions, lack of support and biased attitude of society can ultimately thwart the ambitions of women players. Originality/value: The paper suggests that sports can be used as an effective tool for women empowerment. As part of the feminist inquiry, the attempt here is to expose the inequalities and discrimination against sportswomen.

Women Making Modernism

Women Making Modernism stands as a corrective to the consistent tension between feminist studies and modernist studies. Despite waves of feminism in the academy, feminism remains ancillary even in the expanded arena of new modernist studies. This volume makes the case for feminism’s necessity in modernist studies, arguing that without an integrated feminist approach our modernism is irresponsible at best and dishonest at worst. And the contributors included here take as their cue the renewed fervor around feminist inquiry in literary studies in the academy—exemplified by the new feminist literary studies journal, Feminist Modernist Studies (FMS), launched in 2018—and beyond. Collectively we assert the value of amplifying the reality of women’s contributions to modernism by exploring a myriad of women writers through a diverse set of approaches. Along the way, many of our authors engage in self-reflection, taking into account their personal histories, social locations, and anxieties, thus bridging the arbitrary division, long enforced by patriarchal postures of intellectualism, between the academic and affective self.