Forum Introduction: Queering the “Closet” at Work

Abstract

It has prompted research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) identities across the field's subdisciplines, challenged normativity, and pursued questions about deviance, desire, gender, and performance. Organizational communication, however, has been somewhat reticent about queerness, perhaps even a bit resistant. For example, in this journal-the flagship outlet for organizational communication scholarship-the word queer has never appeared in the title, abstract, or keywords for an article prior to the publication of this forum. Passing mentions of the word have occurred fewer than 20 times, usually in forum essays rather than featured articles and never as a central theoretical framework. As some scholars have argued,

Envisioning More Equitable and Just Futures: Feminist Organizational Communication in Theory and Praxis

“…In 2003, there was also a foundational special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality about queering communication (Yep et al, 2003). However, the first time that the word “queer” appeared in either a title or an abstract of MCQ was in 2018 (Harris & McDonald, 2018).…”

Legacies, Present, and Futures: Introduction to the Special Issue on Feminist Organizational Communication

“…Further, the uptake of more intersectional approaches to feminist organizational communication scholarship has been notably slow and publicly disparaged (Cruz et al, 2020). Despite the dynamism of areas such as queer theory and feminist new materialisms (e.g., Harris, 2016; Harris & McDonald, 2018; McDonald, 2015), there is still a dearth of research pertaining to Black feminisms, African feminisms, transnational feminisms, and non-Western feminisms (outside of U.S. contexts). This latter point is evidenced by the limited number of pieces we received spanning these traditions as a result of our call for this special issue.…”

Teaching and Gaining a Voice: A Rhetorical Intersectionality Approach to Pedagogy of Feminist Organizational Communication

“…The remaining MCQ articles discussing intersectionality are (a) a book review of Ashcraft and Mumby’s Reworking Gender: A Feminist Communicology of Organization (Kirby, 2007) that displays the same attention to code-switching and bracketing we have turned to in this article, (b) two articles exploring meaning making and communication work across diverse contexts (Broadfoot et al, 2008; Urbiola Solís & Levin Kosberg, 2015), and (c) Buzzanell’s (2018) response to forum pieces that orient researchers’ attention to the significance of queer theory. Buzzanell offered specific commentary, recognizing a silencing process that had left out the term “queer” from titles and published pieces until the forum’s publication (Harris & McDonald, 2018). She pointed out that many of the issues were raised in the 1990s, a particularly relevant comment given the 1994 publication date of “Gaining.”…”