To be accountable: The whiteness of feminist organisation studies

Abstract

In this short article, I discuss the silence about white feminism in feminist organisation studies. Drawing on histories and contemporary critiques of white feminism in and outside academia, I ask how white feminism might operate in feminist organisation studies and what we might do to address privilege, hierarchy and exclusions.

To be accountable: the whiteness of feminist organisation studies

Please take out the racial descriptor white to describe the women in your article.

Please take out the discussion on whiteness from the article.

Reviewers’ comments to me.

Please explain if the women in your sample are middle-class and white, and if so, whythis is and how this affects your analysis and argument.

Note that Ahmed is a queer critical race feminist. You have de-raced and de-queeredher theorising.

Me as a reviewer.

We note your repeated critiques of the author’s lack of attention to Ahmed’s thinkingas a queer critical race theorist but we have decided to publish the article anyway.

Editors in response to my suggested revisions.

Race isn’t something that is discussed in New Zealand

White feminist authors’ response to my suggested revision that they attend to racial and ethnic categories in their description of women workers.

Introduction

As feminist scholars in the twentieth anniversary edition point out Organization has a track record in publishing feminist work (Harding et al., 2013). But to date, feminist organisation studies has given very little attention to its own ‘white feminism’ or that of participants in its research. Above I start with a sprinkling of glossed quotes from my experiences of being reviewed by and reviewing for feminist scholars to illustrate ways in which ‘white feminism’ operates in publishing in organisation studies. These are just a glimpse and of course, scholars of colour describe a wide range of racisms experienced in organisation studies and Business Schools (See e.g. Dar et al., 2021; Nkomo, 1992, 2021).

The phrase ‘white feminism’ covers a range of meanings and instances across popular lexicon, think pieces, speeches, YouTubes, social and online media, and academic writing. For some, the term is too ill-defined, ‘capacious’ and ‘amorphous’, ‘sensationalist’ and conflating non-feminists, the white industrial feminist complex and academic writing by Black, Indigenous, white and scholars of colour (Leonard, 2022; Nash, 2022). But for anti-racist academics, white feminism denotes political projects which come from, and universalise, a white cisgendered middle-class able-bodied perspective. In short, white feminists centre ourselves and our experiences and those of middle-class white women, explicitly or implicitly, as its subjects, whilst ignoring our racial and economic privilege and particularity. In such a project, experiences of white women become seen as ‘universable’ to all women (hooks, 2000; Lorde, 1984). But to date, feminist organisation scholars have given extraordinarily little attention to how we enact ‘white feminism’. Indeed, ‘feminist whiteness’ (Lepinard, 2020) functions through these silences and deflections (Rowe, 2000).

To be clear, white feminism does not mean ‘any feminism’ espoused by white feminists (Aziz cited in Neville-Shepard, 2023). Hence, white feminism constitutes a feminist political project inattentive to histories of colonisation and racism (Ahmed, 2017; Moreton-Robinson, 2000). Briefly speaking, it has been defined ‘an iteration of white hegemony’ that ‘prioritizes the experiences, needs, and desires of white women at the expense of women of color’ (Neville-Shepard, 2023: 5). Drawing on Black feminist bell hooks’ definition of feminism as the challenging of sexism, sexual exploitation and sexual oppression, Black feminist Ahmed (2017) explains, that these

cannot be separated from racism, from how the present is shaped by colonial histories including slavery, as central to the exploitation of labour under capitalism. (p. 5)

Critical whiteness feminist Jessie Daniels (2021) argues that ‘feminism without an understanding of critical race theory easily maps onto white supremacy’ (p. 88). White supremacy understood here not as the ‘self-conscious racism of White supremacist hate groups’; but ‘a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources’ (Critical race legal scholar Francis Lee Ansley 1989 cited in Ngo, 2020: online).

In sum then, white feminism reproduces exclusionary definitions of equality and womanhood (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023). Through a ‘specific way of viewing gender’ (Beck cited Dalley, 2021: 2), ‘“woman” is presented as an uninterrogated, monolithic figure, and all difference (of race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and class) is thereby erased’ (Dalley, 2021: 2). Underpinning this view of womanhood are the values of white, bourgeois cisheteronormativity and an ‘implicit commitment to white supremacy, ableism, and cisgenderism’ (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023: 19). Accordingly, white feminism foregrounds gender as the primary and single axis of inequality and a shared oppression around which a supposedly universal sisterhood can mobilise (hooks, 2000). But which minimises racialised and classed dimensions.

History of critique

White feminism as an object of scrutiny is not new. As British sociologists, Ashlee Christoffersen and Akwugo Emejulu (2022), write, ‘Black, Asian, lesbian, queer, and disabled women have long critiqued the excluding and exclusive category of “womanhood” as practiced by. . .“white feminism”’ (p. 6). Women of colour, Islamic feminists and Indigenous scholars have a sustained history of confronting white feminists and feminisms on a range of counts: excluding women of colour’s lives, theories and problems; ignoring our collusion in racism, imperialism and colonialism and being oppressors as well as oppressed; marginalising faith; devaluing the research of women of colour; hoarding academic resources; asset-stripping the academic achievements of women of colour; and (e.g. Amos et al., 1984; Ang, 2020; Carby, 1982; hooks, 2000, Lewis and Hemmings, 2019; Mahmood, 2011; Moreton-Robinson, 2000; Tomlinson, 2019).

In organisation studies, scholars are beginning to reflect on whiteness in organisation studies and organisational practices (e.g. Bates and Ng, 2021; Grimes, 2002; Hunter et al., 2010; Liu and Baker, 2016; Liu and Pechenkina, 2016; MacAlpine and Marsh, 2005; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014; Samaluk, 2014). But much less attention has been given to white feminism and white femininities (see Liu, 2020; Swan, 2010, 2017 for exceptions).

But gender is not race neutral. Whiteness works through gender and is a historic, contextual process. Whiteness structures feminist lives, thinking, methods and academic practices. Furthermore, Indigenous and scholars of colour foreground the connections between colonialism, white femininity and equality politics that is, ‘feminist ideals of justice and egalitarian community’ (Ahmed, 2017; Moreton-Robinson, 2000).

Feminist agenda setting

White middle class subjects and issues become ‘the preferred and ‘natural’ feminist subject, thereby orienting and appropriating feminism’s priorities and discourses’ (Lepinard, 2019: 184). As Audra K. Nuru and Colleen E. Arendt explain

White women feel entitled to set feminist agendas that articulate concerns that are narrowly defined by a singular axis of oppression (e.g., gender) without recognition of their racial privilege (e.g., Whiteness) (cited Neville-Shepard, 2023: 5).

In so doing, white middle class cisgendered women are seen as the proper, good subjects of feminism and minoritised others excluded, educated or saved by feminism (Lepinard, 2020).

British critical race education scholar, Heidi Mirza (2015) argues white feminism is preoccupied with certain topics. These include (white) gender equality, work-life balance, success, leadership, and power in white male dominated boardrooms and universities: all common preoccupations in feminist organisation studies. She stresses that these do not connect with issues facing women of colour for example: as racist policing, Islamophobic state surveillance, the growing incarceration of people of colour, and forced migration; all which could be of potential concern in organisational studies.

Feminists of colour have challenged the ‘exclusive universalism’ of White feminist political strategies from abortion rights, contraception access to women’s work and gender pay (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023). Thus, Black and Asian activists insisted that second wave abortion rights should include ideas about bodily autonomy which took account of resistance against virginity tests and forced sterilisation of women of colour in Britain and across the former British colonies (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023). They stress the significance of collectives of racialized bodies not just individual women’s bodies and how these are controlled by the British state (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023).

Feminist whiteness

Of course, masculinist mainstream organisation studies ignore race and their own whiteness, and reinforce patriarchy, racial hierarchies, heteronormativity, cisgenderism. Feminist studies are marginalised in organisation studies as feminist OS make clear (Bell et al., 2020). That said, middle-class cisgendered white feminists are in powerful gate-keeping and knowledge production roles in academia, sitting on editorial boards; in senior positions as heads of department and Professors; leading funded research projects; and editing journals, special issues and conference streams, peer reviewing articles; supervising PhD students and post-docs.

White feminist middle-class ciswomen secure ‘institutional mobility’ based on ‘racial privilege’ which is rarely discussed (Rowe, 2000: 69). As Ahmed (2018) explains ‘White feminism’ can be characterised as ‘a relation to an organisation’, a way of

Thinking about. . .how an emphasis on being included in existing structures, on being promoted within those structures, leaves the structures in place, including whiteness itself as a structure. . .Black and brown women become the ones who are ‘helped up’ the ladder by white women. Advancement of individual women also becomes understood as the advancement of gender equality. (p. 341)

Scholars of colour have detailed the epistemic, intersubjective, and structural violence they experience in academia, where they are ‘tokenized, silenced, stolen or marginalised’ (Ali et al., 2023; see also Ahmed, 2000, 2018; Mirza, 2015). Indeed, in their editorial on anti-racism and white supremacy, organisational studies scholar, Helena Liu et al. (2021) stress ‘the acts of censorship, silencing, bullying, gaslighting, co-optation, erasure’ that they and other scholars of colour experience (p. 4).

Challenged by scholars of colour, British based feminist journal Feminist Review outlined how whiteness is ‘stitched into the fabric of FR’s practices, structures and spaces’ (Gedalof, n.d.). One of the white editors Ida Gedalof gives examples from these scholars: multiple micro- (and not so micro-) aggressions in meetings, in email communications, and in co-editing and reviewing. She writes that the spaces of FR are ‘shaped around white bodies of a particular kind’, with ‘harmful and exclusionary’ effects which normalised racialised hierarchies, structures and processes (Gedalof, n.d.).

Critical white scholar Elinor Lepinard (2020) notes the ‘diverse ways in which (and extents to which) feminism is made white and the location of white feminist privilege made invisible or acknowledged’ (p. 83). British white feminist organisation studies are beginning to acknowledge feminist whiteness but with little deep engagement. For instance, the editors of a recent special issue on feminism mentioned that it was not as inclusive as they had hoped because the (white European) guest editorial team ‘did not embody intersectional, postcolonial or decolonial feminist experience’ (Bell et al., 2019). As a result, they write it contributed to a ‘limited view of feminist theory and activism’. They suggested ‘there is thus a need to decentre the white, Western woman who has been the main subject of feminism, and we trust that more feminist work can be submitted to this journal to this end’.

In a later article, they acknowledge in organisation studies, ‘much research is written by white people, about white people and for white people’ (Bell et al., 2020: 14). It’s noteworthy that there is some attention to race which is largely missing from many feminist organisation studies but the authors neglect race in the rest of their review of feminist organisation studies, including explaining that most articles they cite do not reference race. In neither discussion is there any reflexivity about their own or other feminists racialised, classed, cisgendered power and hierarchy and complicity; nor indeed how to take redistributive anti-racist action other than just ‘trust’ some other editors make change happens.

Conclusion

My discussion here does not mean middle-class white cisgendered men do not need to do any transformational work. Critically reflecting on white feminism is not about asking scholars of colour to become disciplinarians or saviours or ‘diversifying’ white feminism (Nash, 2022; Nash and Pinto, 2021). Scholars of colour have identified the exhausting embodied, cognitive and emotional labour undertaken by feminists of colour to try to transform white feminism (Mirza, 2015). As Australian Indigenous academic Moreton-Robinson (2000) argues ‘Indigenous women do not necessary want to be “included” in white feminism; they do not want to be white’ (p. 174). Or as Black feminist Barbara Smith said in an interview, ‘White women don’t take up a lot of space in my consciousness at this point’ (cited Nash and Pinto, 2021: 888).

In sum, I am to raise questions about what kind of academic, organisational and political labour we white feminists need to do to take stock of our practices, politics, investments and intellectual work. Citing feminist critical race scholar Sherene Razack, Terese Johnson (n.d.) argues that white feminists need to acknowledge our complicity within oppressive systems and understand how we are positioned within them, and ‘use the power that we are afforded within these structures to work towards undoing them’.

In their editorial in Organization on Black Lives Matter, Raza Mir and Patrizia Zanoni (2021) call for us to be accountable. To quote from Ahmed:

to be accountable, we need to recognize that there are no necessary or ‘right’ actions. The question of what actions should be taken is always to be decided; it is always dependent on context. . .paying attention to how feminist theorizing is produced is also about producing collectivity, not as that which is ‘behind’ the work that we do, but as that which is formed by those very acts of theorizing. . .It involves finding better ways of speaking and working with each other. What counts as feminist theory might in some sense be a question of what forms of work can enable forms of collectivity which allow us to dispute our terms of analysis in a way which is for feminism, or for each other. (Ahmed, 2000: 102)

Such accountability and internal critique is necessary by organisation studies scholars. The way forward cannot simply be laid out by me in this very short article with a series of programmatic bullet points. Rather we can use this 30th Anniversary to undertake collective self-critique of institutional whiteness in our field, hear what we are told about racism and coloniality by scholars of colour, and attend to the racialised, and racist power relations in our theorising, research and publication practices.