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This chapter takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Academy. It is posted with urgency at a time when Patriarchy is resurging across the globe. My complaint is against the misogyny and the moral injury done to all of us and to our participants through our detached, disembodied, non-relation, pseudo-objective, masculine ways of becoming and being CMS scholars. Drawing on the thinking of Hélène Cixous, I offer five gifts as strategies to break with the masculine reckoning and open up our scholarship to féminine multiplicity and generativity: loving not knowing, return to our material bodies, rightsizing theory, knowledge made flesh-to-flesh and women’s writing. I visit, and suggest our scholarship will benefit from visiting, Cixous’s School of the Dead and her School of Dreams. I advocate for social theatre/performative auto/ethnography as a way to effect change in organisations. Finally, I present a manifesto for women’s writing that can help take our scholarship ‘home’ and contribute to the creation of flourishing organisations. This letter is a Call to Arms.

This chapter explores how writing ‘with animals’ can contribute to the development of feminist and queer approaches in Critical Management Studies (CMS). The chapter is theoretically framed with previous work in organisational studies and CMS on gendered writing and introduces the queer practice of ‘dog-writing’ used by feminists in human-animal studies like Donna Haraway and Susan McHugh. Cixous’ essay on ‘On birds, women and writing’ is used to introduce the idea of writing as a ‘difficult joy’. The author then uses writing from her personal journals to ‘write with animals’, especially birds, to show how thought can start. Writing with animals means to be-in-the-world with animals and recognise the ways they are foundational to not only organisational life, but thought itself. By drawing on developments by queer and feminist writers in human-animal studies CMS writers can engage with contemporary creative resistance practices and offer affirmative alternatives.

A central issue in contemporary dance ethnography is that of writing the somatic – the attempt to articulate kinesthetic, bodily sensations that emerge in a particular culture or context, within a research format (Ness, 2008; Sklar, 2000). Emerging methods including performance making and poetic, narrative, experimental, or performative writing create space for recognition of choreographic and sensory knowledges within ethnographic research.This chapter presents a case study that illustrates what I term “movement-initiated writing”: writing that emerges through dance making, wherein the dance ethnographer is a participant observer in studio practice. This emic approach attempts to translate the felt affects of a specific world of movement into performances sited in the terrains of pages. This mode of writing draws on Roland Barthes’ (1977) notion of the “grain of the voice,” Gilles Deleuze's concept of the “minor literature” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), Hélène Cixous’s examples of écriture feminine (Cixous, 1991), and the field of performance writing.

In almost 100 years of Colombian cinema, very few productions have had action-oriented narratives at the core of the film, as this cinema has chiefly developed around mainstream genres of melodrama and popular comedy. Rather than a cinematic end, ‘action’ has worked more as a specific means, mainly through thrillers, for directors to represent, question, and denounce the Colombian armed conflict – a central national issue for over 70 years. Whilst such films have tended to showcase male heroes, some recent productions subvert this tradition, and echo aspects of contemporary action cinema in Hollywood, where female representations problematise the perpetuated male image of the action hero.

This chapter examines contemporary Colombian films that offer hybrid images of female warriors who are (anti)heroic or disruptive, within the conventions of the action genre and within the dominant patriarchal discourse of Colombian narrative cinema, concentrating on Rosario Tijeras (Maillé, 2005) and La Sargento Matacho (González, 2017). Following research on Colombian cinema, context and conflict, this chapter highlights how female characters subsist in the public sphere, taking an active part in illegal armed organisations. It also questions how these representations may promote typologies of female emancipations (victimisers, anti-heroines, hybrid tomboys and war fighters), articulating key notions of emancipation. Ultimately, this chapter reiterates how postmodern representations of the female body subvert classic features of the Hollywood action cinema, by offering inaugural images of tough women within the Colombian/Hispanic popular culture and contexts, by examining particular sequences through Creed's multiple views on the female multi-faceted representations in cinema and Tasker's ample theory on action women and bodies.

Radical feminist theory and practice has actively questioned power relationships between men, women and people of color as a cornerstone of capitalist development since the 1970s while demonstrating the differential impact of such inequality generating structures and relationships on lives and bodies. Their argument about the process of social reproduction and, especially, the reproduction of labor-power both achieved through the dispossession of the female and (colonial) body and the expropriation of their work (Federici, 2004) is acutely relevant to the analysis of the consequences of the unfolding Global Financial Crisis. Yet, the crisis can be a motivating force for changing the established power relations. Using three different case studies of female initiatives aiming to counteract the imposition of neoliberal attack on their livelihoods in crisis-stricken Greece, the chapter examines how the existing experience of feminist thinking and activism from within and outside of academia, can contribute to the cultivation of affective embodied relations, and building upon the idea of “feminist solidarity” (Mohanty, 2003), in addressing the challenges of the crisis and post-crisis policies.

This chapter describes why safe spaces are needed in education settings for full inclusion of gendered identities as they intersect with categories such as race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and ability. This discussion briefly addresses varying and intersecting levels and domains of privilege or marginalization such as identity, inter-/intraaction, organization, society, and knowledge, and how safe spaces in education can support learning as it is entwined with gender, gendered biases, and power dynamics and structures.

I propose in this chapter that the dominant practice of critical management studies (CMS) is characterised by white masculinity, where theorising tends to assume a white universal norm while commodifying difference. This approach treats diversity as something CMS has, rather than is. In order to disrupt the prevailing practice, I explore how anti-racist feminisms (a term I use here to refer to the diverse movements of postcolonial feminism and feminisms of colour) may shape CMS towards a more reflexive and meaningful engagement with difference. In reflecting on my own performance of white masculinity as an aspiring critical management scholar, I suggest that an anti-racist feminist approach bears the potential to challenge relations of domination within CMS and reinvigorate our pursuits for emancipation. It is my hope that the anti-racist feminist perspective advanced in this chapter may offer an opportunity for critical management scholars to ‘do’ critique differently through a radical inclusion of previously marginalised perspectives.

The sexual and erotic dimensions inherent in leadership’s physicality impact on power dynamics within organizations but have been rendered largely invisible by current scholarship. In organizational practice, leadership is a masculine activity ideally carried out by male bodies, such that women’s leadership is still perceived as problematic. This suggests that the field is fearful of allowing sexual bodies to pollute what should be a functional, cognitive and instrumental activity. This chapter therefore draws on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to explain how and why the sexual body is positioned as the unspoken other of leadership. To do this, I explore the representation of two very contrasting leaders, Jean Luc Picard and the Borg Queen, in the popular film Star Trek: First Contact. The film illuminates how leadership ideally resides in a virile, mastered and distant male body. The sexual female body is represented as disgusting, dangerous, and a source of contamination and so must be cast out and destroyed. Finally, I ask whether the representation of the Borg Queen is useful as a transgressive means to undermine the abjection of the female leader’s body. However, I conclude that to counter abjection, scholars of leadership need instead to build discursive and material practices that revalue the feminine and respect the alterity of self and others.

While physical reactions and experiences are pervasive in the experiences of leaders and followers, most writing and theorising about leadership fails to register physicality’s significance. Consequently, this chapter relies primarily on a creative narrative, ‘The Interview’, to make visible the physicality in leadership. ‘The Interview’ records the experiences of three leaders in ConstructCo as they prepare for and reflect on the interview for a new CEO. Though fictional, the narrative interweaves real experiences from the lives of leaders with whom I have worked. The narrative form and allowing characters to speak give licence to the physical to appear and take its proper place as a crucial dimension of the leadership experience. The second half of the chapter explores the implications of the physical in leadership, beginning by mapping some of the dimensions of physicality experienced by the three characters in the narrative. The following discussion argues that those of us who research, teach and work with leaders should be open to seeing the way conventional norms mask the physical. I explore what new means and approaches are needed in research and writing to bring physicality into development work with leaders. This chapter, including the narrative and subsequent discussion, argues that being aware of physical selves, with the humanness, vulnerability and connection with others that physicality brings, offers new possibilities to our ways of being in leadership.