This article seeks to contribute to the discussion on organizational space and gender by focusing on a powerful tool for management learning—popular culture and, in particular, Hollywood films. Taking a performative practice approach to the study of both gender and space and working with films featuring women in the central organizational role, this study explores the protagonists’ spatial practices as these are used to subvert, intentionally or unintentionally, organizational patriarchal structures. In this context, the study traces both how space is gendered through particular situated social practices and how gender is spaced, or how gender performativity is materialized in and through organizational space. Findings show that although on surface organizational spaces marginalize women, certain spatial practices can hybridize the workspace and transform the “margin” into a “space of radical openness.” This new space can also aid in subverting the traditional “strong plot” of the career woman, thus transforming both what we know and how we know in organizations.
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