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In this short piece we take issue with the current separatist tendencies that are being expressed in certain parts of the queer community. We illustrate how this compares with central ideas in proto-queer thought and queer theory, and how it risks undermining the possibility of a queer dialogue and queer politics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological implications of queering organizational research. The author examines three related questions: what does queering organizational research entail?; how have organizational scholars queered research to date?; and how does queering organizational research and methodologies advance our understandings of organizing processes?

The paper begins with an overview of queer theory, which is followed by a review of the ways in which organizational research and methodologies have been and can be queered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of queering organizational research and methodologies and offers research questions that can guide future research that draws from queer theory.

The author claims that methodologies are queered through a researcher’s commitment to enacting the philosophical assumptions of queer theory in a research project. Much of the value of queering methodologies lies in its disruption and critique of conventional research practices, while enabling us to explore new ways of understanding organizational life.

Queer theory is still nascent but growing in organizational research. To date, there has been little consideration of the methodological implications of queering organizational research. This paper discusses these implications and can thus guide future research that is informed by queer theory.

Queer theory is a form of critical analysis that aims to destabilize hegemonic discourses around sex, sexuality and gender, particularly in relation to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities. This discursive chapter focuses on how queer theory, when transformed into method, or queering, provides a more embodied and holistic understanding of student learning in higher education. It notes that, whilst queering has become an applied method in some areas of higher education research, it has yet to address the phenomena behind university students’ sexual orientation and a more general orientation towards or away from study and learning. Core to such a method is: a four-dimensional paradigm for understanding the power of dominant discourses related to the body and orientations to learning – performance, performativity, materiality, and incorporeality; explorations of orientations towards or away from learning in which sexually influenced pleasure/shame amplifies those orientations; and longitudinal narrative enquiry.

Of all the aspects of theories that contain “postmodern sensibilities,” none seems to engender as much unease and resistance in its critics as the presumed celebration of moral deficit and the supposed debunking of ethical universalism. The charge of nihilism is usually traced back to a number of thinkers broadly associated with postmodern or poststructural theory. Nietzsche and his attempt to go “beyond good and evil,” as well as Foucault's disdain for the centered epistemological subject, are frequently cited as examples of postmodern theory's inability to grapple with the ubiquity of ethical issues, concerns for responsibility and the necessity of making moral valuations. While concerns for ethics do not appear, at first glance, as central issues, theory that is broadly associated with postmodernism is, I contend, often deeply aware of issues surrounding ethics and morality.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical reflection on the profound changes regarding sexual minority rights in Britain and Ireland. It seeks to illustrate how recent legislative changes can impact the working lives of gay employees living and working in nonmetropolitan locales. The paper also aims to assess the role of LGBTQI movements, groups and networks, in facilitating voice and visibility and advancing equality.

Secondary research was undertaken to assist in contextualising the empirical findings, within a literature review. The paper presents findings derived from a qualitative study, involving in-depth interviews with 44 gay men in Britain and Ireland.

LGBTQI movements and groups have played a crucial role in facilitating voice, and visibility for LGBTQI people in both Britain and Ireland. These movements have themselves, undergone change, moving from liberationist-queer-radical approaches to normalising-sexual citizenship-radical approaches. Significant legislative advances have taken place in the 2000s, and these have had a positive impact on gay workers. However, there is a continuing need for organisations to respond in ever more strategic, effective and inclusive ways, if the promise of sexual citizenship is to be realised by gay people in the workplace. Local, self-organised LGBT groups can play an important role in building sexual citizenship in nonmetropolitan locales.

This paper’s value and contribution lie in its application of theoretical principles and models, most notably models of sexual citizenship, in a specific historical, geographical and spatial context. The paper offers an insight into the lives of gay men who reside and work in nonmetropolitan locales; and highlights the emergence of subtle forms of gay resistance and radicalism, through self-organised groups.

Purpose – This chapter examines the relationship between prenatal testing, Down syndrome identification, and selective termination practices, and it does so by considering whether the selective termination of fetuses with Down syndrome might constitute genocidal practices.

Methodology/approach – Exploratory and speculative in nature, this chapter brings the phenomenon of prenatal testing and selective termination practices together, and explores whether the increasingly widespread termination of fetuses with Down syndrome fits within definitions of genocide.

Findings – Addressing perceptions of Down syndrome and disability, and integrating aspects of crip politics and definitions of genocide, this chapter concludes that the phenomenon of selective termination involving fetuses with Down syndrome can constitute genocide when particular definitions and interpretations are adopted.

Originality/value – This chapter is perhaps the first academic text to critically evaluate the relationship between prenatal testing, selective termination of fetuses with Down syndrome, and criminological genocide scholarship. Importantly, it does not evaluate individual decision-making practices regarding termination, but instead focuses on collective practices and conditions that work to minimize the number of people with Down syndrome in society.

The progressive limits to rights mobilization have become starkly apparent in the past two decades. No new suspect classes have been forthcoming from the Supreme Court since 1977 despite continued demands for legal recognition by lesbians and gays, indigenous peoples and others interested in expanding civil rights doctrine. Public tolerance for civil rights measures has likewise dried up. Since the 1960s, referenda on civil rights have halted affirmative action programs, limited school busing and housing discrimination protections, promoted English-only laws, limited AIDS policies, and ended the judicial recognition of same-sex marriage, among other issues. Nearly 80% of these referenda have had outcomes realizing the Madisonian fear of “majority tyranny”¹ and signaling the Nietzschean dread of a politics of resentment (Brown, 1995, p. 214; Connolly, 1991, p. 64).

The authors set out to study institutional work under complexity building on the struggle for legitimacy of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community in Israel as their case study. The authors took a discursive approach and were interested in what actors claim they do. The findings suggest that actors manipulate the intentions and outcomes of their acts, thereby claiming for actorhood or negating it. These differential constructions are not random but echo the norms of the discursive spaces within which they are presented and interact with other actors’ work. Overall, the authors argue that actorhood is not a pre-condition for institutional work, nor is it its outcome, but rather an integral part thereof.

Critical management studies (CMS) has been criticised on a number of fronts, not the least of them being its poor track record of reflecting and challenging its internal mechanisms of hierarchy and exclusion. Acknowledging these issues, this chapter explores the role queer theory can play in developing a queer friendship with CMS, whereby CMS might be able to reflect on its normalising tendencies. This chapter does not claim that queer theory is a silver bullet which can deliver itself or otherwise work miracles for solving the complex problems that beset CMS. Rather, it seeks to fan the queer embers that already exist within CMS to spark queerer futures. Part of this endeavour involves bringing CMS and queer theory closer together, but not so close that the two become comfortable companions. As this chapter suggests, a queer friendship will involve antagonisms and tensions between queer and CMS help each other to refute the normative at every turn and gesture towards something more: queerness. Pursuing this project, this chapter provides a brief review of queer theory before outlining current queer stirrings within CMS. The remainder of the chapter focuses on what we might hope to happen from CMS and queer theory being yoked together in a queer friendship, such as bringing queers to the fore in business schools, queering management conferences and embracing forms of queer negativity that condition more radical conceptions of the future.

The paper uses archival materials, interviews, and secondary scholarship to examine debates among Indian coalitional activists on legal argumentation against India’s national sodomy law in Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi in particular, and in their mobilization activities in general. At the heart of activists’ debates was whether “rights to privacy” was the appropriate legal justification with which to argue the unconstitutionality of the sodomy law. Activists warned against uncritically advancing the notion that the sodomy law was an unlawful intrusion into an individual’s privacy, understood in spatial terms as existing within the bounds of a physical home or area, instead highlighting how gender and class shaped queer citizens’ engagements with private space. The paper argues that activists’ critical examinations of private and public space in the Indian context problematize canonical foundations of queer theory and sociological approaches to sexual citizenship, much of which assumes that all queer life moves from an inner sanctum of private secrecy, experienced as shameful, to an outer realm of equality vis-à-vis the state, the public, and the economy through declarative acts of embodiment. Drawing on critical queer studies scholarship, the paper argues that the legal debates in Naz and Indian queer activism reveal the unstated Western liberalism in prevailing scholarship on the promise of law for queer communities in contexts where core differences exist in material and social realities, and, consequently, in the meanings that individuals attach to space, privacy, embodiment, and visibility.