Do We Take Our Bodies to Work? Towards a Queer Organizational Communicology of the Body

• In Event: Sexual Harassment Issues in Organizational Communication

Abstract

In recent years, more scholarship has begun to address and theorize the materiality or organic human body in organization; however, such work appears to be absent in organizational communication. Through examining the historicity of both body and bodiliness as well as four areas of organizational communication scholarship where the material body is most prevalent-Foucaultian “lenses” or analyses, sexual harassment, human-technology interface, and emotional labor, I argue that the material body is less absent, but more embedded within organizational communication scholarship; however, this “body” of scholarship appears to be constructing a normative “organizational body.” As such, I offer a queering of this “organizational body” in order to highlight its constructedness, leaky boundaries, and paradoxical relationship with the organic human body/other. To this end, I close with a rough queer organizational communicology of the body.

Author

• Craig O Rich, University of Utah