Call for Papers

“Can we think of gender beyond a strict binary?” and if so, ‘How may we organise to make lives liveable?” asks the non-binary trans writer Saoirse Caitlin O’Shea (2018). This sub-theme aims to discuss these pressing questions by diving into queer worldmaking through tracing and theorizing the various ways in which creativity and imagination is at play in embodied LGBTIQA+ [= evolving acronym that stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning, asexual”] experiences and attempts to organize for liveable lives (Steyaert, 2022). As Audre Lorde (1984) argued a long time ago, differences are the sparkle for creativity, not to ‘just’ create something new, but to make through its dialectics a difference in the lives we lead and organize.
 
This process has been discussed and developed as ‘queer worldmaking’ by several queer theorists. In their understanding of worldmaking as both creative and performative, intimate and public, disruptive, and utopian, Berlant and Warner (1998: 562) argue that “improvisation is always necessary” in worldmaking, as queer culture cannot fall back on any institutional matrix to organize life.
 
Relatedly, in her discussion on queer phenomenology, Sara Ahmed (2006) discusses the creative potentials of drawing inspiration from experiences of queer embodiment to queer heteronormative organizational spaces and contexts; this can enable spatial and temporal configurations where queer bodies can find space to fit. We suggest that the latter might be promising for rethinking organizational spaces, processes, and practices (e.g., Vitry, 2021; Rumens et al., 2019), and for unsettling conventional ways of researching and writing as organization scholars (e.g., Lafaire et al., 2022).
 
Engaging with the affective potentials of queer worldmaking (Schultermandl et al., 2022) through an embodied perspective arguably offers theoretical access to organize creatively for liveable lives. For instance, using embodied trans*formation, trans*ference and trans*gression permits the performance of queer subjectivities into writing (O’Shea, 2018). Further, referring to Nelson Goodman’s “ways of worldmaking” (1978) and drawing upon performances of minoritarian artists, the Cuban queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz (1999: 195) describes worldmaking as making worlds of “transformative politics and possibilities” through performances with the ability to establish alternate views of the world.
 
Artistic and everyday performances can thus engender worlds of potentiality, unsettling creatively the present and mapping out alternative queer futures with hope and desire (Kemp, 2009). Through disidentification and other forms of resistance, marginalized minority groups often use the majoritarian culture as a raw resource to subvert and transform dominant cis-heteronormative ways of worldmaking into performances of imperfect, queer futurity (Muñoz, 2009). Equally, Morris and Nakayama (2013) have noted how LGBTIQA+ people have richly and creatively embodied, interrogated, and extended this concept through artful exhibition, street activism, and practices of everyday life.
 
In this sub-theme, we specifically advocate for the exploration of intersectional conceptual approaches, such as those rooted in queer-feminist and queer-decolonial perspectives, to illuminate diverse viewpoints on queer worldmaking. The application of queer approaches to the generation of decolonial knowledge, displacing Western rationality as the sole possibility of existence and thinking (Mignolo & Walsh 2018), underscores the significant contribution of decolonial approaches in organizing creatively for just lives.
 
Furthermore, we draw attention to the capacity of art, combined with intersectional theories, in augmenting our comprehension of human rights issues that pertain to the fluidity of gender, sexuality, and cultural production. Making connections, for instance, with queering concepts such as “borderlands” (Anzaldúa, 1987), “’world’-travelling” (Lugones, 1987) and queering methods such as “auto-theory” (Gayed, 2022) might allow for creativity to be understood through intersectional in-betweenness, multiplicity and playfulness, and empower researchers to engage with theory, life, and art from the vantage point of lived experiences. In light of this, we extend our invitation to interdisciplinary investigations and contributions that remember and reframe historical ways of being and becoming to organize in creative ways (Butler, 2011).
 
Inspired by these and other theoretical alliances, this sub-theme calls for empirical, conceptual, artistic, and activist contributions that research creative practices of queer worldmaking by inscribing, e.g., intersectional and affective perspectives. We specifically encourage academic work that advances understanding of creativity and imagination of queer worldmaking for the organization of liveable and just lives in all kinds of organizational fields (e.g., Keenan et al., 2021), social spaces (e.g., Rivera-Servera, 2004), and urban places (e.g., Bain & Podmore, 2021), ranging across everyday situations (e.g., O’Shea, 2018), artistic experiments (e.g., Dolan, 2005) and activist interventions (e.g., Lawley, 2020).
 
We thus invite for papers that document the “inventiveness” (Berlant & Warner, 1998: 588) of queer worldmaking along the following themes, emphasizing that this list is not meant to be exhaustive, as in our view understanding queer worldmaking also requires (the queering of) creative research work and inventive theory-writing (Lipton, 2022):

• Queer embodied affective accounts of imagining and organizing dialectics of queer differences and liveable lives, other futures, and utopian life-worlds.

• Intersectional theorizing of creative queer embodiment, organization, and disorganization within, e.g., decolonial and anti-imperialist frameworks.

• Creative worldmaking practices and creations of counter-publics in queer performance, troublemaking and play through creative, artistic, and aesthetic practices.

• Queer worldmaking as creative research work, theory-making, embodied and autoethnographic writing on lived experiences of queerness.

• Queer and art-based work exploring worldmaking as a creative practice for transforming management and organization research and education.

To facilitate wide ranging discussions at the crossroads of queer worldmaking and organizing, we invite conventional papers and encourage creative and artistic formats as well. Please state in your submission your preferred method of presentation should your contribution be accepted for presentation.
 

References

• Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

• Anzaldúa, G. E. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.
• Bain, A. L., & Podmore, J. A. (2021). Placing LGBTQ+ Urban Activisms. Urban Studies Journal, 58(7), 1305–1328.
• Berlant, L. & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in Public. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547–568.
• Butler, J. (2011). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.
• Dolan, J. (2005). Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Ann Arbor: Michigan Press.
• Gayed, A. (2022): “Queering Diaspora Through Visual Art: Contesting the Double Binds of Homonationalism.” In: D. Abdelhady & R. Aly (eds.): The Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas. New York: Routledge, 181–196.
• Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub.
• Keenan, H. & Lil Miss Hot Mess (2021). Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood. Curriculum Inquiry, 50(5), 440–461.
• Kemp, J. (2009). Queer Past, Queer Present, Queer Future. Graduate Journal of Social Science, 6(1), 3–23.
• Lafaire, A. P., Soini, A., & Grünbaum, L. (2022). In Lockdown with My Inner Saboteur: A Collaborative Collage on Self‐compassion. Gender, Work & Organization, 29(4), 1331–1345.
• Lawley, S. (2020). Spaces and Laces: Insights from LGBT Initiatives in Sporting Institutions. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 33(3), 502–514.
• Lipton, B. (2022). Ways to Write an Academic Life: Queering the Academic Curriculum Vitae. Management Learning, 53(3), 566–581.
• Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossings Press.
• Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception. Hypatia, 2(4), 3–19.
• Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Morris, C. & Nakayama, T. (2013). Queer Editorial Overture. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Fall, v–ix.
• Muñoz J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising Utopias. The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
• O’Shea, S. C. (2018). This Girl’s Life: An Autoethnography. Organization, 25(1), 3–20.
• Rivera-Servera, R. (2004). Choreographies of Resistance. Latinalo Queer Dance and the Utopian Performative. Modern Drama, 47(2), 269–289.
• Rumens, N., Moulin De Souza, E. & Brewis, J. (2019). Queering Queer Theory in Management and Organization Studies: Notes toward Queering Heterosexuality. Organization Studies. 40(4), 593–612.
• Schultermandl, S., Aresin, J., Whybrew P. & Si, S. (2022). Affective Worldmaking. Narrative Counterpublics of Gender and Sexuality. Bielefeld: Transcript.
• Steyaert, C. (2022). ‘If a (queer) revolt is to come’: Toward a sensuous pedagogy for dis/orienting management learning. Management Learning, 53(4), 734–747.
• Vitry, C. (2021). Queering Space and Organizing with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. Gender, Work and Organization 28(3), 935–949.
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