This article aims to claim 'body size' as an increasingly important axis of signification. It draws on research from various disciplines to present an exploratory overview of the different ways in which body size categorizations-being (considered) fat or slender-intersect with other axes, such as gender, race, sexuality, social class and age. The article argues that an intersectional perspective on body size adds to our understanding of the layeredness and complexity of power differentials, normativities and identity formations that co-produce inequalities. Furthermore, it attempts to show how processes of exclusion and marginalization based on body size categorizations are similar to racist, ableist and misogynist logics and practices. Hereby the article intends to demonstrate the vast (negative) impact of body size categorizations, specifically but not exclusively on the lives of those who occupy the marked position in relation to this axis: the 'fat'. It argues that an intersectional perspective helps us to see body size discrimination more clearly and can help disrupt dominant discourses about the body in order to create a truly 'healthy' environment in which bodies of all sizes, shapes, colours and abilities can be celebrated.

No abstract

In this paper, I present an autoethnographic story about my experiences of expressing breast milk at a Dutch university department. My story illustrates how interrelated and conflicting discourses about gender, motherhood, breastfeeding, embodiment and professionalism raised issues about (in)visibility, embodied control, spatiality and discipline of my body and shaped my experience as a newly maternal employee. This paper thus aims to include bodies and embodied experiences in organization studies and highlights the need to consider spatiality as an important topic of research. I address these issues in my writing and use insights from feminist poststructuralism to show how the experiences I describe are part of a larger cultural framework of power structures that produce the 'leaky' maternal body as the Other, subject to (self-)discipline and marginalization. I hope my story inspires reflexivity and empathic understanding of the complex reality of experiences related to expressing breast milk in the workplace.

The spread of COVID‐19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this collective contribution is catching a glimpse of corona‐life and its micro‐politics of multiple, often contradicting claims on practices as many of us live, work and care at home. It embodies concerns, dreams, anger, hope, numbness, passion and much more emerging amongst academics from across the world in response to the crisis. As such, this piece manifests a shared need to — together, apart — enact and explore constitutive relations of resistance, care and solidarity in these dis/organizing times of contested spaces, identities and agencies as we are living–working–caring at home during lockdowns.

No abstract