Check out the excerpts and a video teaser (see below) from my forthcoming paper in Organization, the critical journal of organization theory and society, co-written with Emmanouela Mandalaki.
Dance with us, on the dancefloor and with words.
We write as we dance to discuss how eroticizing through the other’s presence our embodied nakedness, beyond sexual stereotypes, pushes us to meta-reflect on ourselves as organisational ethnographers and writers to reinvent our field and writing interactions as inter-corporeally relational and intersubjective.
Without names, phone numbers or obligations. All the poetry of the world contained in our abrazo. Violins bring our breath closer together. Then silence separates us. The dance floor reclaims its cathedral-like emptiness, waiting for us to come and re-inhabit it once the music starts again. I feel myself existing not only for you but also with you. I don’t know who you are, or if we’ll meet or dance again. But in that brief eternity, we were one. What does this mean, for me, for us, for those who danced with us that night? Then rationality kicks in: I remember that I’m doing fieldwork.
We problematize the sexual gaze that traditionally associates nakedness with shame and objectified vulnerability to stress the capacity of eroticizing our academic nakedness to enable free, embodied knowledge stripped of the traits of the dominant masculine academic order. In so doing, we join burgeoning autoethnographic and broader debates in the field of organization studies calling for the need to further unveil the embodied, erotic, and feminine aspects of organizational research and writing.
The nakedness that we experience in our fields is our ‘qualia’: it is an unfamiliar term to denote that, which could not be more familiar (Dennett, 1988), but which more often than not remains hidden. It is ‘as raw feels’ (Dennett, 1988) on our flesh and our skin (Cixous, 1996; Brewis and Williams, 2019); what our embodied experience seems and feels to be in the organisational contexts that we research, work in, and write about.
Dance-performing our naked eroticized embodied selves, and writing about it without asking permission or apologizing, seemed a relentless necessity. We are unable to research-live-write otherwise.
Shall we dance?
Read the full dance-paper here.
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