Resumo

The gender literature is the product of a long tradition of the binary understanding of sex and gender as innate and unified identities. Queer studies have challenged this conception and brought up new paradigms on how people can negotiate and enact their identities in social relations.

In this theoretical essay, we defend that the queer approach is a useful tool to apprehend the dynamics of gender relations in organizations - including the specific processes of discrimination.

Identity in general and gender identity, in particular, was until the beginning of last century solely based on essential and binary cartesian divisions (Butler, 1990; Hall, 2005). With the emergence of the sociological subject, the identities of "men" and "women" were understood as socially and historically constructed (Yannoula, 1996). Queer theory emerges in the 1990s to question the use of these categories as universal signifiers (Souza, 2017). This paradigm understands identity as both political, intersectional, and performative - permanently negotiated.

Regarding its methodology, the presented paper fits as a theoretical essay. Here, the authors critically assess existing theories in the subject matters of interest, i.e. gender, identity and queer studies, through its history, identifying flaws in the past approaches and arguing the preeminence of the emergent queer studies to address contemporary issues such as power relations and dominant norms within the organizational context.

Queering identity in organizations, first of all, smashes essentialized and apolitical notions that view workers as disembodied subjects, still very present in the business literature. Organizations are gendered (Acker, 1990), and so are the subjects that circulate within them. Queering gender in organizations is necessary to reduce the “exclusionary operations” (Butler, 1993: 19) that gender categories inevitably cause. It also evidences the nets of power that regulate the gender categories in the organization, and the intersections that are more or less valued in that environment.

Although not able to individually change society as a whole, organizations have the agency to change themselves internally, building an environment that recognizes and respects the plurality of gender and promotes gender equality. Queering the company opens space for gender non-conforming bodies, identities and expressions by questioning day-by-day practices and more deeply rooted dynamics that are profoundly gendered in nuanced ways.

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