This article explores performative enactments of gender at work in a UK-based Search and Rescue voluntary organization, QuakeRescue. Based on ethnographic research, we analyze how gender is performatively constituted in this male-dominated setting, focusing in particular on how hegemonic masculinity is enacted through bodies, physicality, and technical competence. Our findings show how performative acts, predicated on essentialist understandings of superior masculine bodies, constructed femininity as limited, deficient, and Other, legitimizing the assigning of mundane, routine tasks to women volunteers. By endorsing women's presence, albeit as low-status team members, there was sufficient recognition to ensure that sedimented practices of "doing gender" at QuakeRescue remained largely unquestioned. We conclude that hegemonic masculinity predicated on bodily practices in male-dominated workspaces is oppressive in its effects, and until this is recognized and acknowledged, transformative potential is limited.

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What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers worked on identity narratives as helpers, heroes and hurt. The primary contribution we make is to analyse how meaningfulness (the sense of personal purpose and fulfilment) that people attribute to their lives, is both developed through and a resource for individuals’ narrative identity work. We show how organizationally based actors attribute significance to their lives through authorship of desired identities which are sanctioned and supplied by societal (master) narratives embedded in and constitutive of local communities. In our case, the helper and hero identities dangerous volunteering offered members were seductive. However, their pursuit had ambiguous and sometimes, arguably, negative consequences for volunteers who had seen action overseas, and our study adds to understanding of how organizational members’ quest for meaningful identities may falter and sometimes fail.

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