Sexuality

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Heterosexuality means sexual preference for the opposite sex, homosexuality a preference for the same sex, bisexuality a fluid preference. Transsexuality indicates someone who assumes the outward appearance and perhaps some of the physicality of the opposite sex, possibly augmented by hormones, but who does not undergo gender reassignment surgery, thereby passing a point of irreversibility that would make him or her transgendered.

The broad recognition of the social impact of sexuality in various spheres has been relatively recent, largely as a consequence of the consciousness-raising efforts of “second wave” feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and the focus on de facto discrimination and the almost simultaneous efforts of women, facilitated by the advent of oral contraceptives, to take control over their bodies and their sexuality. Organizations and institutions became a major site of such struggle. The gay and lesbian movements followed closely and forced a greater sense of diversity into the sexuality debates of the 1980s.

The initial direction of these movements was to focus on directly discriminatory language, behaviors, and exploitative images, such as in advertising, where women were represented as either domestic and maternal or sexually available, and subsequently to expose and critique any more indirectly discriminating social arrangements that worked by normalizing an implicitly preferred sexuality. This is most commonly experienced as heteronormativity, a privileging of heterosexual relations, propagated through social power strategies of homosociality. Queer theory takes this critique further, taking aim at majoritarian strategies that seek to normalize subgenres of sexuality within the homosexual arena. Often drawing on poststructural theory, this approach connects sex and power and exposes the often-subtle but profoundly effective ways in which minorities, which can include intellectual minorities, are marginalized or erased from the social scene. In the field of organization studies, some critical approaches follow similar minoritarian strategies and are often marginalized, suppressed, or rejected by the mainstream.

Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin first theorized organizational sexuality, emphasizing that sexuality and organization are mutually constituting. Joanna Brewis and Stephen Linstead built on this work by examining the similarities between normalized work and sex work, in particular in terms of commodification, self-identity, and performance and the role of desire in what they termed a heterotics of organization. Their work also considered the potential of the organization of specific sexual practices, such as sadism and masochism, for providing insights into conventional organizing processes.

Application

Over a 30-year period, sexual harassment has developed as the major area of impact of the consideration of sexuality in case work in organizations and institutions. This has also had a methodological impact on field work, originating in anthropology, where field workers began to acknowledge the sexual dimension of their research roles. As Wim Lunsing did, some researchers now [Page 861]openly admit to having had sexual relations with respondents and argue that the impact of this on their research was not necessarily negative, and often quite the opposite in that it gave them access to otherwise unavailable information and experience. Discourse analysis has made an important contribution in a wide range of studies whose key insights are that a broad spectrum of activities could be considered to be harassment; that the interpretative context is critical; and that harassment is primarily an issue of power rather than sexual desire—sexuality being the medium of its realization rather than the cause.

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