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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 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.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

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.

Trans theory (also known as transgender studies) is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field in which activism, scholarship and lived experience are coalescing around questions of embodiment, personhood, and intersections of race/ethnicity/class/ability/gender/sexuality. Trans-themed research, whether explicitly located in trans theory or not, is a growing area of academic exploration. As a trans researcher and trans person, I am interested in two questions: how does autoethnography fit within trans and queer theory, and how can people who do not live in trans communities undertake ethical trans-related research? A symbolic interactionist perspective informs my understanding of trans theory and the social construction of identity and embodiment. I explore my own femme transmasculinity through autoethnography, and also consider my experience interviewing other trans people as part of researching masculinity. I suggest that researchers who are not trans (who are cisgendered, meaning they identify with the sex/gender they were assigned at birth) must accept that trans people have what Talia Bettcher (2009a, 2009b) terms First Person Authority over their embodiment, experience, and narratives. Having established this, I examine self-identification and intersubjective recognition in relation to my own experience of femme transmasculinity, asking what is femme incoherence and how does this relate to queer and trans theory/politics?

This chapter explores queer theory as a “thought of a method” in educational ethnography by sharing stories of two third grade boys and situating them in a discussion of Britzman’s ideas about reading and Butler’s notion of fantasy. The stories are presented as a possible queer educational ethnography, in which the ethnographer writes the fantastic narrative of the boys as they read creatively to reveal and unsettle gender and reading as sites of constraint to which other constraints adhere. The boys’ reading itself is a queer reading of these constraints and as such makes alterity visible and possible. The study and the methodological framework suggest that educational ethnographers and other adults who work in schools should become attuned to the markers of constraint and alterity, so as to recognize, shelter, and maintain the alterity that children make possible. The chapter asserts children must be allowed to read for alterity, and shows how fantastic narratives that emerge from such readings are limited by the hushing of individuals who disallow alterity in classrooms. Ultimately, this chapter is relevant to ethnographers of education in that it suggests that queer theory not only is necessary to narrate and thus shelter the ways that gender can and should be unsettled in classrooms, but also allows us to narrate and shelter other queer urgencies related to fear, violence, and vulnerability that children experience or share in classrooms. Implications for the current climate of school reform based on standardization of curriculum are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to develop queer futuring strategies that take into consideration adult learners’ needs in support of transformational and sustainable change for social justice and equity.

This paper develops the construct of queer futuring, which engages queer theory perspectives in a critical futures framework. Adult learning theory informs queer futuring strategies to support adults and inform education to sustain transformational changes for social justice and equity.

With social justice in mind, queer futuring opens spaces and supports opportunities for adults to engage in learning activities that address historical and layered forms of oppression. Building on learning needs of adults to create meaning and make a difference in the world around them, queer futuring strategies provide tools for activism, advocacy and building new relationships and ways of being-with.

The sustainability of our current system of growth and financial well-being has already been called into question, and the current pandemic provides tangible evidence of values for contribution, connection and concern for others, even in the midst of political strife and conspiracy theories. These shifting values and values conflict of society point to the questions of equity and narrative inclusivity, challenging and disrupting dominant paradigms and structures that have perpetuated power and authority “over” rather than social participation “with” and harmony. Queer futuring is just the beginning of a bigger conversation about transforming society.

Queering spaces from the perspective of queer futuring keeps the adult learner and queering processes in mind with an emphasis on affiliation and belonging, identity and resistance and politics and change.

The authors suggest queer futuring makes room for opening spaces of creativity and insight as traditional and reified rationality is problematized, further supporting development of emergentist relationships with the future as spaces of possibility and innovation.

Queer futuring connects ethical and pragmatic approaches to futuring for creating the kinds of futures needed to decolonize, delegitimize and disrupt hegemonic and categorical thinking and social structures. It builds on queer theory’s critical perspective, engaging critical futures strategies with adult learners at the forefront.

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 paper's aim is to examine how diversity management discourse reproduces heteronormative essentialist notions of identity in organisations.

This is a critical analysis of diversity management discourse that draws upon concepts, frames and the language of queer theory and insights from social identity construction to offer an alternative approach to reconceptualising diversity management. The key question of the paper is: what are the conceptions of identity underpinning the diversity management discourse and how do they reproduce heteronormativity?

The paper unveils the reproduction of binaries in diversity management discourse. Possible counter strategies from queer theory are proposed to alter the diversity management discourse.

This paper offers a first reading of diversity management discourse against the grain from a queer perspective and offers possible points of departure for altering diversity management discourse.

The relationship between ontology, realism, and normativity is complex and contentious. While naturalist and realist stances have tended to ground questions of normativity in ontology and accounts of human nature, critical theories have been critical of the relationship between ontological and normative projects. Queer theory in particular has been critical of ontological endeavors. Exploring the problem of normativity and ontology, this paper will make the case that the critical realist ontology of open systems and complex, contingent, conjunctural causation deeply resonates with queer theory, generating a queer ontology that both allows for and undermines ontological and normative projects.