Gender, Work & Organization Conference Stream 6: Feminisms from the margins in work and organizations: Intellectual insurgencies to achieve social justice

This is a call for abstract for Stream 6 - "Feminisms from the margins in work and organizations: Intellectual insurgencies to achieve social justice", at the Gender, Work and Organization 2023 conference, taking place 28 - 30 June  2023 at Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa

Convenors: 

Jenny K Rodriguez (University of Manchester, UK)

Caroline Rodrigues (Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil)

Marcela Mandiola Cotroneo (17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, México)

Juliana Cristina Teixeira (Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil)

Elisabeth Anna Guenther (University of Vienna, Austria)

“La razon eurocentrada presentandose a si misma como la unica existente nos ha despreciado, ha despreciado nuestros cuerpos, nuestra lengua, nuestros modos de hacer y recrear el mundo, ha invalidado nuestras formas de experimentarlo y hacerlo posible (Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, 2020)

"Our experience cannot be read as stories to ‘lull those of the big house (the enslaver's residence)' but rather to bother them in their unrighteous slumber" (Conceicao Evaristo, 2007, p. 21)

This stream is interested in works that address feminisms from the margins as the avenues to construct new futures for debates and praxis to tackle inequalities in work and organizations. There is much scope for these discussions to engage with strategies of reclamation, de-marginalization, re-existence and insurgency to interrogate the multiplicity of possibilities of organized societies, management paths, epistemologies, ontologies, writings, and research interrogations that go beyond the metaphorical use of terms like intersectionality or decoloniality, and instead focuses on research committed to situated social justice. 

Feminism continues to be of importance in discussions about intersectionalities, work and organisations given its central role in highlighting, challenging, and contesting marginalization, exclusion and invisibilisation. However, there are fundamental dilemmas about inclusivity, social justice between axes of oppressions and privileges that create ambiguity, fractures, and new challenges, and require more dialogue and discussion. For example, the intersectionalities of marginalization are multi-layered and speak to complexity and nuance in the articulation of socially constructed categories of difference and how their ascribing processes operate (e.g., race/racialization, ethnicity/ethnicization, gender/gendering, class/classing, among many others).

Some important tensions have brought to the fore the fractures within feminism as the dominant feminist intellectual project is considered too White/Anglo/Western Eurocentric. One of the main tensions is its history that has simultaneously made visible the struggles of some groups of women and largely ignored the struggles of others. This tension has led to questions about what is next in the fight against inequalities and the achievement of social justice in social and working life. An important point underpinning these discussions is the question of how to remain with the struggle whilst not reproducing the exclusion that has historically characterized it.

Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso (2020) has argued that it is important to call out the commitment feminism has and continues to have with Western modernity because it is only through this recognition that we are able to see how the feminist project has imposed universalizing truths about struggles for social justice in ways that have othered diverse groups and located them in a dehumanizing and illegitimate position. The question of feminism is then different when asked from a position that has normalised the suffering and death of Black/indigenous/racialized groups.

Against this backdrop, feminisms “from the margins” (e.g., decolonial feminism, Islamic feminism, intersectionality feminist, Black feminist) have emerged as critical voices and voices of the ‘otherwise’. These feminisms have existed concomitantly with mainstream feminisms, but their genealogies have been part of hidden and marginalized epistemes. For example, these feminisms are rooted in traditions that primarily rely on the oral histories of the marginalized; they speak the language of the everyday and, in doing so, remain outside the realms of formalized structures and discussions about work and organizations. 

The reproduction of hierarchies of value in knowledge production, which has been ordinarily used as a mechanism of colonial power to locate ‘the Other’, is reproduced in the treatment of feminisms from the margins, which have not been awarded the same intellectual status of feminisms emerging from the hegemonic centers of power. In this respect, their epistemes remain largely obscured in discussions about Othered lives and their (re)productive existence. The latter has been exacerbated by what Mansoor (2016) terms West-centric patriarchal articulations, such as empowerment, agency and selfhood, which are used to sustain binaries between margin and centre, agency and disempowerment and third world feminism and first world feminism.

In addition, dialogue with decolonial feminism related to intersectionality brings a challenge and commitment to address anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-sexism, anti-imperialism, anti-ethnicism and anti-LGBT+, the Anthropocene, and other axes of oppression, when debating and understanding the multiplicity of systems that dia[logically] compose modern society (Vergès, 2020). In this way, feminisms from the margins speak to the intersectional inequalities from a perspective that encompasses activist praxis in research committed to social change (Collins, 2015). These feminisms aim for the non-hierarchization of exclusionary bordering and the elimination of the dominance of the heritage of Eurocentric models and formats of research.

Thinking about the critical role of the academy, even with its ambiguities and limitations, we believe that engaged research can build, register, think, and organize knowledge production and what we consider activist research in an ‘otherwise’ way. In this space, feminisms from the margins brings to the fore the work of research activists that promoting epistemic, ontological, and organizational changes in a society that sees modernity and coloniality as ways of doing and organizing power, being, and knowledge (Maldonado-Torres, 2019).

We are interested in engaging in dialogue about feminisms from the margins both as explained in this call and as understood in ways that are not included in this call. We recognise that discussions are shaped by different positionalities and locations and our aim is to engage in dialogue that centers the potential of feminisms from the margins to be catalysts for intellectual insurgencies that can tackle inequalities in work and organizations and achieve social justice.

In addition, we welcome discussions that displace what is understood by intellectuality (e.g., social movement perspectives). We understand the limitations of intellectual insurgencies that originate from the academy without interlocution with oppressed social groups, streets, cities, peripheries, and urban political activism. Our point is that intellectual insurgencies based on a conception of exclusionary intellectuality that does not recognize local knowledges, hurt the very origin of transformational praxis.

Abstract Submission: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMb3MCG_yOaGFLU5nhj0wlgYkBlUJ-U5W5pRyveXmJRNd0Gw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Deadline for abstract submission: 7 November 2022

If you would like to discuss a submission or are interested in more details about this stream, you can get in touch with convenors at: feminisms.margins@proton.me

References

Collins, P. H. (2015). Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142

Espinosa Miñoso, E. (2020) Volver sobre nuestros pasos. Balbucear el proyecto. Pikara Magazine. Available at: https://www.pikaramagazine.com/2020/07/volver-pasos-balbucear-proyecto/ 

Evaristo, C. (2007). Da grafia‐desenho de minha mãe, um dos lugares de nascimento de minha escrita. In M. A. Alexandre (Ed.), Representações performáticas brasileiras: Teorias, práticas e suas interfaces. Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Mazza Edicoes.

Maldonado Torres, N.. (2019). Analítica da colonialidade e da decolonialidade: algumas dimensões básicas -- in J. Bernardino-Costa, N. Maldonado Torres & R. Grosfoguel (Orgs). Decolonialidade e pensamento afrodiaspórico. 2° Ed. (pp. 27-54). Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora.

Mansoor, A. (2016) “Marginalization” in third world feminism: its problematics and theoretical reconfiguration. Available at: tps://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201626

Silva, C. R. (2020). Writing for survival (… and to breathe). Gender, Work and Organization, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12578

Teixeira, J. C. (2020). Brazilian housemaids and COVID-19: How can they isolate if domestic work stems from racism? Gender, Work and Organization, 28, 250–259.

Teixeira, J. C., Oliveira, J. S. de, & Mesquita, J. S. (2019). Pode a Interseccionalidade ser Afrocentrada no Campo da Administração? Um Ensaio Teórico sobre as contribuições da Teoria Interseccional na área de Administração. In ANPAD (Ed.), EnEO 2019 (pp. 1–11).

Veillette, A. M. (2021). Racialized Popular Feminism: A Decolonial Analysis of Women’s Struggle with Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas. Latin American Perspectives, 48(4), 87–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211015324

Vergès, Françòise (2020). Um feminismo decolonial; translated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias and Raquel Camargo. Sao Palo: Ubu Editora.  

Yang, E. and, & Wayne, T. K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1(1), 1–40.