Abstract
I am extremely grateful to the editors of this special issue for allowing an old man some narcissistic satisfaction in looking back over 30 years. I shall try to make this piece both personal and political, for the two are always, ever entwined. In the early 1980s I was walking around a municipal library in Lancaster city centre happily browsing, when a book stopped me in the aisle and spoke to me. It begged somewhat insistently for attention out of the corner of my eye. I picked it up and noted that it was dusty and completely unborrowed since acquisition. It was about medieval monastic life and was luridly called Love Locked Out. I put it back on the shelf, thought again, and yet again, about reading it, and decided, despite its manic protestations, to go home without it. But driving back, the bloody book kept entering my consciousness as being about a form of organizational life of which I knew nothing. Later that evening I returned (or more accurately was forced to return) to the library and borrowed the book. That was how the article ‘Sex and organizational analysis’ began – the seduction of a specific reader by a specific book that cried out for attention. I hope you have had, or will have, the same bibliophilic experience.
In terms of University politics, there was very little pressure to publish in those days and we had a Head of Department who was tolerant of our research-led indolence (if not of our weekly pan-departmental Friday drinking and pool playing event). We worked in a department of men and women who enacted space inside and outside the University rather than simply filled it. The playfulness of academic life 30 years ago meant we were allowed not to ‘underestimate spaces of activity and negotiation’ (Riach and Wilson, 2014: 329–345). And please note, dear reader, much more research-led indolence is devoutly to be wished for in this 21st century of performativity based ABS lists and their fetishization (Cluley, 2014). Eventually, the hugely rewarding investigative reading on the topic gestated, and I presented the basic article to an all-male seminar in Lancaster’s Department of Sociology. The absence of those women members of staff was glaringly obvious and seemed highly significant. There were nevertheless some helpful if phallogocentric comments in the seminar and when added to those from close colleagues in other Departments (with whom in those days one freely exchanged rough drafts across the social sciences) perseverance with this core material seemed in order. In those halcyon years many colleagues let articles atrophy in their filing cabinets, for one worked on articles out of excitement—not a sense of careerist duty.
The article had a relatively easy passage past the reviewers and, as this was my first attempt to get something published in a journal (after seven years as a lecturer!) I thought foolishly it was always going to be like this. But on publication, the ‘naming’ process began. Who would write on a prurient topic like this? It was followed by attempts at ‘shaming’. What could be that man’s motivation for talking about such issues? There was the attribution of motivations to the author because ‘there must be unsavoury reasons for him writing about sex’. To avoid this labelling I sometimes tried to make a joke of it saying (truthfully, because I do believe this is the case) we all research our own inadequacies. But a few Warwick colleagues and male MBA students alike continued to imply that this article—and critical teaching based around it—was motivated by something akin to priapism.
Yet, this shaming was to little avail. For 30 years I have taught this type of material and told anyone who would listen of the centrality of sex to the organization and not just to its individual membership. Today, many students still appear to be interested and choose the topic as a single essay question from amongst five or so choices. One recognizes in reading these essays, however, that many students are very well aware that in future employment ‘they must manage the performance of sexuality in specific work contexts’ (Rumens and Broomfield, 2014: 365–382). Of course, this recognition does not mean that they do not find the grey haired old man in front of their lectures somewhat creepy. So for years I have attempted to ‘professionalize’ the discourse and, as Sullivan points out in this issue, strongly disavow any sexual agency of my own by repeatedly indicating to students the difficulties in speaking of such issues in a university setting. It is therefore most helpful to find this interest being further legitimated in this special issue.
With regard to fusing the personal and the political, as we know, sexuality is increasingly organized and therefore increasingly reflective of power, resistance and control. Courtney’s paper in this issue draws attention to the tension between fixed identity categories and moments of transgression-in-process and it is here, in the maelstrom of dialectics where, in my view, any analysis of ‘domination’ needs to reside. And in seeking such an analysis, we are provided by Hearn with a summative article of considerable potency in a look at the ‘Northern’ future for the analysis of ‘what sexuality is’. Jeff has been a major writer in this area and we have all benefitted from his insights into ‘sexuality and organization’, now suggestively expressed (Hearn, 2014) in an extra-ordinary way. Indeed, along with many others, his contribution in this field over the years dwarfs anything that arose from that single piece of provocation, written in 1984, at the indefatigable behest of a lonely book sat in a small library, miles from a university.