Archived seminar
27 November 2013: Un/doing chrononormativity: negotiating ageing, gender and sexuality in organisational life (CISC Seminar Series)
Dr Kathleeen Riach, Dr Nicholas Rumens and Professor Melissa Tyler
At 13:00 in 6.345.
Abstract:
This paper is based on a series of ‘anti-narrative’ interviews with LGBT men and women designed to encourage critical reflection on the ways in which lived experiences of age, gender and sexuality are negotiated and narrated within work organisations in later life. It draws on Judith Butler’s performative ontology of gender, and how the desire for recognition is shaped by heteronormativity.
The paper develops a critique of the impact of heteronormative life course expectations on the negotiation of viable subjectivity within workplace settings. ‘Chrononormativity’ shapes lived experiences of ageing within organisations, at the same time as constituting an organising process in itself.
Drawing on Butler’s concept of ‘un/doing', the paper analyzes the simultaneously affirming and negating organisational experiences of older LGBT men and women. The paper concludes by emphasizing the theoretical potential of a performative ontology of ageing, gender and sexuality for studying work organisations, and the methodological insights to be derived from an ‘anti-narrative’ approach to sociological research.Dr Riach is a Reader in the Essex Business Schoool and an Associate Professor in the Department of Management at Monash University, Australia. Dr Rumens, whose research focuses on LGBT friendships in the workplace, is a Professor of Management at Middlesex University. Professor Tyler is a Professor of Work and Organization Studies in the Essex Business School.
Further information can be found at: http://www.essex.ac.uk/sociology/research/centres/centre_cisc/default.aspx