Review Essay New Directions in Queer Theory: Recent Theorizing in the Work of Lynne Huffer, Leo Bersani & Adam Phillips, and Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman

Spatially organizing future genders: An artistic intervention in the creation of a hir-toilet

“…Even if gender binaries have been increasingly disrupted (Harding, 2016; Linstead and Pullen, 2006; Muhr et al, 2016; Rumens et al, 2019; Thanem, 2011; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2016), our active intervention in a unisex single-occupancy toilet and its sign revealed how binary thinking about genders predominantly defines human relations at work (Brewis et al, 1997; Dougherty and Goldstein Hode, 2016; Jeanes et al, 2011; Mumby and Stohl, 1991; Rumens, 2012). The intervention, followed by a spatial analysis, thus helped us to better understand the duration of binary categories and separations in a specific workplace, the engineering department of a university steeped in a history of disciplinary fact finding and science practice.…”

“…There is a hint of this thinking in Žižek’s (2016) reminiscence of how, on entering a door marked ‘gentlemen’, he paused and began asking existential questions about maleness. Similarly, but in the context of research practice rather than binary subjects of research, Ashcraft and Muhr (2018) advocate ‘promiscuous coding’ to dissolve the gendered analytical frameworks and metaphors commonly found in leadership studies (also see Collinson, 2005), and to explore the analytic potential of playing with scenes of ‘fantasy and misrecognition’, which are important in gender constructions (Harding, 2016: 78).…”

Affective diaries of quarantine: Writing as mourning

“…Ahonen et al, 2020;Beavan et al, 2021;Helin, 2019a;Mandalaki, 2021aMandalaki, , 2021bPullen, 2018;Pullen et al, 2020;Thanem and Knights, 2019). Through engagement with critical affect theory, and namely Berlant's (Berlant, 2011(Berlant, , 2015Edelman and Berlant, 2014) critical ideas on affect, largely understudied in organization studies with few exceptions (Harding, 2016;Kenny, 2020), I also wish to join the burgeoning organizational studies literature discussing the emancipatory potential of affect for political and relational action (Alasuutari, 2021;Ashcraft, 2017;Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021;Fotaki and Harding, 2018;Fotaki and Pullen, 2019;Kolehmainen et al, 2021;McCarthy and Glozer, 2022). In so doing, I embrace a collective struggle to push the boundaries of conventional academic practices to explore the empowering potential of doing and writing research through critical engagement with embodied and affective experiences.…”

“…It is “an opening of the wound to air,” necessary for redefining the conditions of our lives (Berlant, 1995: 15), embracing these moments of affective dissonance and dissensus, inseparable from collective, solidary political action and constitutive of it (Hemmings, 2012). As Berlant argues, we cannot escape the negativity that informs our encounters with the other (Harding, 2016). But such negativity is not just a necessary evil.…”

Coding military command as a promiscuous practice? Unsettling the gender binaries of leadership metaphors

“…The quest for queer subjectivity, however, is not simply one for new categories. Rather, it entails resistance to fixed identity politics, or staving off categorization altogether (Harding, 2016; Parker, 2002; Pullen et al, 2016). As Butler contends, queer signals a radical otherness – a claim to difference that cannot be pinned down, a commitment to perpetual transgression of expectations, and surrender to the impossibility of accounting for oneself.…”