Emancipatory entrepreneuring as disidentification: A queer-feminist view of becoming a democratic cooperative

Abstract

Democratizing entrepreneurship itself is by far no guarantee for emancipation: the majority can (over)rule, masculinist dominance or regressive ideologies may flourish, and exclusions occur. By ethnographically following the transformation of a socially engaged agency into a diverse cooperative, we offer a processual study of emancipatory entrepreneuring that is undoing the paternal, family-like, and pseudo-democratic enterprise and creates a diverse cooperative with shared ownership, co-leadership, and queered sensitivities to gender, racism, and affective difference. Our analysis thereby relies on the political concept of “disidentification” and its process of queer worldmaking as developed by José Esteban Muñoz. On this conceptual basis, we redraw becoming democratic as an ongoing in-between process of “decomposing” heroic and patriarchally inclined entrepreneurship and ongoingly “recomposing” democratic entrepreneuring through revising interrelated layers of inequality. By introducing the theory of “disidentification”, we contribute with a queer-feminist conceptual vocabulary to analyze the intertwined political and processual nature of emancipation. Transformation is neither understood as a revolution nor a planned linear change but rather as an ongoing in-between process that subversively recycles former, habitual ways of interacting into undertaking different, more inclusive worldmaking.