Female desire in phallocentric industries: A duo-ethnographic interrogation

Abstract

The persistence of workplace inequality requires female subjects to examine their place in exploitative systems of production and consumption, and to identify means for emancipation beyond masculine dominant orders. In this paper we examine our past experiences as young women in the finance and oil industries, the phallocentric and extractive engines of global capitalism. We do this by employing a duo-ethnographic approach and a feminist reading of Jacques Lacan’s ideas on sexual difference, aiming to contribute to the literature on female identification in phallocentric organizations. Our analysis reveals how we oscillated between accepting subordinate feminine subject positions linked to emotional work and striving to access ‘universal’ masculine subject positions linked to success and achievement. At the same time, we both engaged with imaginaries of uniqueness and critique, control and success in order to keep functioning in our roles. Both our stories feature moments of rupture experienced as affective embodied responses, when our organizations placed ourselves or others at risk. We analyse these as moments when cracks were exposed in our fantasmatic survival strategies, leading to our eventual exit from these industries. We conclude that while a feminist Lacanian framework provides a useful lens for understanding processes of female identification in phallocentric organizations, the quest for female desire and subjectivity outside the masculine dominant order requires other (feminist) frameworks.

Introduction

The persistence of workplace inequality requires female subjects to examine their place in exploitative systems of production and consumption, and to identify means for emancipation beyond masculine dominant orders. In this article we examine our past experiences of identification and exploitation in the finance and oil industries. This endeavour is important as female identification has implications for women’s places in organizations and society in general, their access to leadership roles and means of accumulation. Accordingly, our aim is to contribute to the literature on female identification in phallocentric organizations, and to the quest for organizational spaces for female emancipation (Baker and Brewis, 2020; Fotaki, 2011, 2013; Fotaki and Harding, 2018). We place feminist readings of Jacques Lacan (Mitchell and Rose, 1982; Vachhani, 2012) at the core of our analytical endeavour, while also acknowledging the feminist critique of that same framework (Fotaki and Harding, 2018; Irigaray, 1977). Through a duo-ethnographic approach (Johansson and Jones, 2020; Lapadat et al., 2010), we tread carefully into our experiences, thoughts and emotions as women and fragmented subjects within our past workplaces. We aim to explore what a feminist Lacanian lens will uncover about female identification in phallocentric orders, and whether it opens up a space from which female desire and emancipation could be articulated.

According to Jacques Lacan, identity is not fixed but unstable, the result of an iterative process relying on dominant discourses in the social context for its construction (Driver, 2022: 941). An extensive body of literature has used a Lacanian perspective on identification in organizations and shown how his thoughts about the radical openness and fragmentation of the subject (Lacan, 1966, 1977) can enrich organizational theory around workplace subjectivities and resistance (Arnaud and Vidaillet, 2018; Cederström and Hoedemaekers, 2010; Contu et al., 2010; Driver, 2023; Fotaki et al., 2012). While the Lacanian lens has contributed to valuable insights on subjectivities in organizations, feminist critiques of Lacan (Fotaki and Harding, 2018; Irigaray, 1977; Mitchell and Rose, 1982; Vachhani, 2012) have highlighted the dangers of using Lacan’s framework without close attention to sexual difference and the lack of female representation in masculine symbolic orders. Accordingly, as we show in this paper, the attention to sexual difference is key for understanding identification in phallocentric organizations and how this is linked to female subordination, exclusion or, alternatively, emancipation.

Through a duo-ethnographic approach, we examine our own experiences of identification as young women in the phallocentric and extractive finance and oil industries. Operating in roles focussed on client and community relations, we were pulled into these industries to enact ‘feminine’ professional roles relying on qualities of empathy and communication. Our joint exploration of these experiences revealed how we both oscillated between accepting subordinate feminine subject positions linked to emotional and affective labour (Fairchild and Mikuska, 2021; Hochschild, 1983; Ö Zdemir Kaya and Fotaki, 2023a) or striving to access ‘universal’ masculine subject positions (Acker, 1990; Baker and Brewis, 2020) linked to success and achievement. At the same time, we both engaged with imaginaries of uniqueness and critique, control and success to cover over our experiences of lack in order to keep functioning in our roles. In addition, our stories feature moments of rupture experienced as affective embodied responses when our organizations placed ourselves or others at risk. We analyse these as moments when cracks were exposed in our fantasmatic survival strategies, leading to heightened levels of anxiety and our eventual exit from these industries.

Throughout our analysis we ask: Does a feminist Lacanian framework help us explain our recurrent feelings of anxiety and eventual exit from the industries we were involved in? What does this framework add to the understanding of identification processes in (phallocentric) organizations? And finally, does this lens reproduce the lack of subject positions and emancipatory options for female subjectivities? Ultimately, we search for an emancipatory subject position, one which our younger selves may have overlooked, but which may have been available to us in the margins of the symbolic order.

Background

A Lacanian approach to identification in organizations

Numerous critical organizational scholars have turned to Lacan to examine subordination and control in organizations and to explore how subjectivities emerge and are constructed in organizational discourses and work contexts (Cederström and Hoedemaekers, 2010; Contu et al., 2010; Driver, 2009, 2022, 2023; Fotaki et al., 2012; Harding, 2007; Ö Zdemir Kaya and Fotaki, 2023a). Harding emphasizes that a Lacanian lens reveals how ‘organizations are inscribed upon, collapsed into, defined by and constitutive of psyches and bodies which are themselves constitutive of organizations’ (Harding, 2007: 1761).

Lacan’s notion of the subject is constituted in three registers: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real (Arnaud and Vidaillet, 2018). As stressed by Driver ‘every human moves through them as they articulate the self in language, or the symbolic order, encounter the missing real while seeking to defend against this in an imaginary order, where such lack can be overcome’ (Driver, 2022: 952). According to Lacan, ongoing processes of identification and becoming are grounded in the subject’s sense of lack combined with a desire for completeness. In order to alleviate their sense of lack, subjects turn to the symbolic order (or the Other) to identify with certain aspects (norms, rituals and language) which the subject sees as dominant (Driver, 2022; Fotaki, 2011). However, this process of identification is never complete, meaning that the subject needs to engage in the imaginary through fantasmatic narratives of the self in order to cover over cracks that keep appearing in the symbolic order (Arnaud and Vidaillet, 2018).

A Lacanian approach to identification underlines that resistance is not a straightforward process. As Kenny argues, a Lacanian approach illustrates how ‘we are not simply caught up in, and determined by, forces related to our workplaces’ but also ‘engaged in circuits of desire and fantasy that implicate us in the reproduction of dominant discourses’ (Kenny, 2012: 1176). Similarly, Glynos (2008, 2010) emphasizes that fantasies can support a dominant social order by creating an outlet for the subject to channel tensions emerging from the contradictions that a regime produces, using the example of workers who perform their tasks in a highly efficient manner while seemingly relating to their workplace in a distanced and derisive manner. As stated by Zižek (1989): ‘cynical distance is just one way to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them’ (p. 32, author’s italics). What may be seen as resistance is thus not always a threatening form of antagonism but a vital component that can in fact enhance organizational functioning.

While these studies paint a rather bleak picture of the potential for emancipation within organizations through identificatory processes, studies have also shown that there might be room for the subject to resist dominant symbolic orders, or to dis-identify with them (Arnaud and Vidaillet, 2018). As Hoedemaekers (2010) points out, the failure of identification and the need to constantly reiterate identity is a key aspect of Lacanian thought, underlying experiences of jouissance but also the potential for transgression and resistance. Similarly, Driver concludes that the construction of identities can be done in more or less empowering ways and thus is connected to the potential for transformation in organizations (Driver, 2022).

Feminist critiques and phallocentric organizations

Within organization and management studies, the application of Lacan’s thoughts is often carried out without reference to sexual difference. This, note Fotaki and Harding, is highly surprising since ‘sexuality and its implications on gender are fundamental not only to Lacan’s work but to psychoanalytical theory in general’ (Fotaki and Harding, 2018: 56). Accordingly, Vachhani (2012) emphasizes that critical discussions of the phallocentric foundations of Lacanian psychoanalysis are essential to explore the persistence of inequality in the workplace and to understand how dominant discourses interpellate subjects in specific ‘gendered’ subject positions. Accordingly, our main contribution in this text lies in using a feminist Lacanian lens and highlighting sexual difference as key for understanding identification processes in organizations.

We treat the organization as gendered in line with Irigaray’s thoughts on the symbolic order as masculine and woman as lack. Irigaray argues that, beside her reproductive function, there are two roles available to women in the dominant symbolic order; one is that of man’s equal where she would in a near future enjoy the same economic, social and political rights as men; the other is that of femininity which is ‘a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation’ (Irigaray, 1977/1985: 84). These two roles are thus prescribed by the symbolic order and reproduced in organizational life. The limited roles available to women in the symbolic order and their lack of representation in the phallocratic economy imply that female identificatory processes involve a specific dynamic in need of examination. As argued by Irigaray, ‘the exclusion of the female imaginary certainly puts woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentary, in the little-structured margins of a dominant ideology’ (Irigaray, 1977/1985: 30). Accordingly, in Fotaki’s (2013) study of women in academia, women’s lack of symbolic representation inhibits their participation in academia and leads to a constant struggle between resisting and colluding with dominant discourses. As formulated by Fotaki, referring to Kristeva’s (1982) concept of abjection: ‘dominant discourses inhabit women’s psyches and are expressed through a variety of affective responses including self-abjection’ (2013: 1268).

Irigaray’s thoughts on women as man’s equal or as castrated man resonate with Joan Acker’s concept of the ‘universal worker’ (1990). Acker argued that ‘organizational thinking assumes a disembodied and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men’s bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker’ (1990: 139). These ideas have been used within critical and feminist organizational studies to illustrate the ‘false gender neutrality’ of organizations and the way in which women’s career advancements are hindered through ‘gendered processes that implicitly shape the expectations about an ideal worker’s nature, capacities and needs in masculine ways’ (Baker and Brewis, 2020: 2). Studies have evidenced that women who succeed in such phallocentric environments learn to suppress ‘feminine’ values, feelings and behaviour which they perceive as undesired within a seemingly gender-neutral and disembodied organizational context (Baker and Brewis, 2020).

Irigaray (1977/1985: 84) insists that women are also interpellated to maintain ‘femininity’ which is demonstrated in the capitalist economy by the ‘outsourcing’ of relational work (from service to care work) to women or those deemed ‘willing’ or ‘capable’ of performing these roles. Accordingly, the literature on gender, work and organization has highlighted how subordinate or less prestigious roles assigned to women are often focussed on performing emotional and affective labour (Acker, 1990; Fairchild and Mikuska, 2021; Hochschild, 1983, i.e. roles traditionally associated with reproductive labour. In such ‘feminine’ roles involving activities that fall under the broad rubric of ‘caring’ and ‘maintaining’ or ‘supporting’, women are encouraged to act on and perform their femininity according to the structuring logics of capitalism and gender.

At the same time, women who succeed in patriarchal organizations may also emphasize their femininity as a way of appearing non-threatening to the male order. If, following Riviere (1929), we think of femininity or ‘womanliness’ as masquerade operating as a defence mechanism, the post-feminist masquerade operates as a trade-off. According to McRobbie (2016), young women are here offered the markers of success while signalling their continued participation in practices of femininity, thereby emphasizing the fact that they represent no threat to the masculine order. As highlighted by Irigaray ‘In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity’ (1977/1985: 84).

Theoretical framework

Our analysis in this paper is based on Mitchell’s and Rose’s (1982) interpretation of Lacan’s thoughts on sexual difference as well as Irigaray (1977/1985) critique of Lacan’s framework as re-producing women as lack in the masculine symbolic order and the ensuing loss of female imaginary and desire. The Lacanian orders, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, are grounded on a reformulation of Freud’s thoughts of a (boy) child’s developmental phases which assign particular symbolic roles to the mother, the father and the phallus. Followingly, sexual difference in Lacanian thought can be explained in relation to the subject as split due to its entry into a symbolic order in which the phallus is a privileged signifier. Irigaray (1977/1985: 62) argues that Lacan maintains the girl’s castration complex (her lack or non-possession of the phallus) as proposed by Freud, as well as the concomitant ‘penis envy’, which Lacan developed to a structural dimension. As reiterated by Irigaray (1977/1985: 69), the castration complex for the little girl then becomes equal to accepting that she does not possess the penis, which makes her hate her mother, and all women, as they are equally subject to this lack, and turn to her father to get to what she is missing—the phallus. However, since she cannot have the phallus, she instead desires to be the phallus, the symbol of the Other’s desire. To Lacan, this means that the woman tries to be that which she is not: ‘it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved’ (Lacan, 1966: 84).

The way that sexual difference is constructed through the castration complex means that the woman enters the symbolic order in the position of the other. As formulated by Rose, the absolute otherness of the woman, ‘serves to secure for the man his own self-knowledge and truth’. (Rose, 1982: 50). Seen in this way, the participation in the phallocentric order as ‘woman’ is necessary in order to stabilize the fragile construction of sexual difference and the completeness of male identity. As argued by Irigaray, this vocabulary, although symbolic, has particular implications for how the subject is constructed in relation to sexual difference, and thus reproduces the same order which it is claiming to deconstruct. Even if Lacan dismisses any biological pre-given conditions as determinants for sexual difference, he nevertheless places woman as subject to that order, which creates a circular argument from which ‘she’ is unable to escape. As formulated by Fotaki and Harding, Lacan’s ‘truly revolutionary idea of dispensing altogether with the notion of a definable and knowable subject sits uneasily with the potentially misogynistic signifiers Lacan relies on heavily in his theorizing’ (2018: 57). As emphasized by Irigaray, this means that feminine desire is outside the signifying system described by Lacan: ‘the role of “femininity” is prescribed by this masculine specula(riza)tion and corresponds scarcely at all to woman’s desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt’ (Irigaray, 1977: 30).

At the same time, even as they partly agree with this critique, Rose and Mitchell emphasize that Lacan is nevertheless useful for unmasking sexual differences as fragile constructions which the subject strives to maintain. As argued by Rose: ‘When Lacan is reproached with phallocentrism at the level of his theory, what is most often missed is that the subject’s entry into the symbolic order is equally an exposure of the value of the phallus itself’ (1983: 40). The radical fragmentation of the subject thus also applies to sexual identity which Lacan sees as yet another illusion produced by the symbolic order. While Rose concurs with Irigaray that there is a risk that Lacanian thought ends up reproducing the very same symbolic order it is criticizing, she highlights that his thoughts are nevertheless useful for showing the difficulties or even impossibility of fully embodying sexual identity.

A psychosocial approach to duo-ethnography

This paper emerges from our embodied and affective experiences at the core of the capitalist organization: the finance and oil industry; the wheels and the engine of the global economic system as we know it. Based on our co-constructed identities as young women and critical insiders to these organizations, a sequence of writing exercises and peer-to-peer interviews allowed us to jointly explore our experiences, from the time of joining these industries to affective moments of rupture leading to our eventual departure. Pullen et al. (2017) have emphasized how women’s experiences of gendered work organizations are intimately connected to bodies and affective encounters, underpinning the importance of autoethnographic methods to explore and uncover such experiences. As others have shown (Boncori and Smith, 2019; Johansson and Jones, 2020; Kenny and Gilmore, 2014), collaborative autoethnographic methods (also called duo-ethnography, multi-voice autoethnography or joint autoethnography) allow authors to explore commonalities in their backgrounds or current circumstances, providing a ground for theorizing that moves beyond the individual and towards larger political and psychosocial forces.

Background

Prior to our entry into academia, Author 1 worked as assistant to a ‘relationship manager’ in the private banking sector for 2.5 years, while Author 2 worked in ‘community relations’ in the oil industry for almost 5 years. Similarities include subject positions as young, university educated, white women working in what we both came to define as exploitative corporate sectors, performing relational and emotional work. We also shared a sense of having entered these industries by coincidence, emphasizing how we initially joined only as a means to make a living, as new graduates with (a perception of) limited options for professional development.

Cultural differences and collisions were another aspect heightening our feelings as outsiders; starting in our national identities as German and Swedish, part of our work took place in the former Eastern Bloc, while our employers were from wealthy Western countries. Finally, we both resigned by personal choice, and ended up making a career change to academia, a new ‘phallocentric’ order (Fotaki, 2011, 2013) from which to make sense of our past and present selves.

Dialogues and writing

The generation of empirical material for the collaborative autoethnography we employ in this paper proceeded in several steps: (1) a co-construction of memories through initial conversations; (2) a revelation of a series of joint identifications through a peer-to-peer writing exercise where we developed narratives based on the themes ‘entering’, ‘coping’ and ‘leaving’; and (3) two recorded pair interviews guided by a set of questions we had developed beforehand.

As stated by Lacan ‘What happens in an analysis is that the subject is, strictly speaking, constituted through a discourse, to which the mere presence of the psychoanalyst brings, before any intervention, the dimension of dialogue’ (Lacan and 1952/1982: 62). Accordingly, we view our dialogues not as moments when objective truths were revealed, but as processes where we were both constituted as subjects. In this dialogical approach, we took our cues from Kenny and Gilmore’s psychoanalytic approach to pair interviews and autoethnographic research (2014), where they emphasize ‘research affectivity’ through processes of transference and counter-transference. Following Harding (2007), a Lacanian approach to the interview encounter makes visible that there are two persons and two organizations present in the interview situation, ‘each looking in the mirror offered by the other’ and ‘each looking at the organizational mirror offered by the other’ (Harding, 2007: 1765).

Analysis

In our conversations and peer-to-peer writing, we did not focus on critique and disruption, but rather on understanding and empathy. Important for our analysis however, was a need to move beyond these joint surface accounts and delve into things unsaid and ‘unthought’, focussing on symbolic meaning and fantasmatic narratives in our accounts but also on moments of humour or contradiction in our dialogue as ‘gateways’ to our unconscious (Özdemir Kaya and Fotaki, 2023b). Followingly, our analysis proceeded in three steps where various parts of the analytical framework were highlighted.

At first, we carried out a thematic analysis by following the chronology of our experiences and pulling out specific themes in relation to each phase. These revolved around emotional and relational work, being a ‘critic’, the appearance of femininity, female networks of solidarity, feelings of achievement and success, perks and money, feelings of anxiety and depression. As a second step, these themes and how we navigated our experiences were analysed in relation to Lacan’s triad of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. This involved (1) discussing our entry into these industries through our articulation of ourselves in roles prescribed by dominant discourses in the symbolic order; (2) analysing our persistence in these industries as a result of our imaginary responses and how these worked to cover over experiences of lack; (3) how we eventually left these industries due to experiences of symbolic and imaginary failure created by external events that registered as affective responses in our bodies. Third, while gender emerged as an important theme in our thematic analysis, it was through the activation of this binary symbolic structure, of ‘being or having the Phallus’ (Fotaki and Harding, 2018: 73), that we were able to dig deeper into how we articulated ourselves as women, or castrated men, in these organizations and how this was maintained or supported by fantasmatic narratives of ourselves.

Finance and oil: The ‘dirty’ contexts of our co-reconstructed memories

In this section we will present selected sections of our written testimonies and recorded conversations (with a few edits to improve readability, and with italics added for emphasis) based on the chronology of our experiences—entering, staying and leaving—and analyse how we moved through these phases by identifying with positions available to us in the symbolic, justifying our choices and covering over our sense of lack in the imaginary while at the same time experiencing the real as haunting us through feelings of anxiety and depression. To start with, as a background to the reader, we will make a brief summary of our careers in the respective organizations.

Author 1 was recruited into Private Banking in late 2005 straight out of university as a fluent Russian speaker for a role involving contact with mainly Russian and Ukrainian clients. She was hired by the London subsidiary of a Swiss Private Bank to assist one of their Relationship Managers with a client base predominantly from Eastern Europe. Formally based in London, the role involved administrative and organizational duties, training in financial assets and -management, as well as direct client contact. This soon led to regular business trips, usually to Russia and Ukraine, to assist with (and interpret) during client meetings—the clients being HNIs (High Net worth Individuals), and usually keen to transfer assets abroad securely, and to evade taxation of revenues by their national governments. She was promoted to Supervisor within 6 months of joining and was encouraged to aim for the role of Relationship Manager herself after a few years on the job, which would require her to obtain her own book of clients. After an incident referred to later in this text, she resigned in the summer of 2008.

Author 2 came to Albania in 2010 as part of an internship with a Norwegian company building a dam in the country. She was then hired by a consultant to conduct a Social Impact Assessment for a Canadian oil company in another part of Albania. The company and the oilfield were growing quickly during this time and became a major contributor to employment and tax revenues in the region. This also led to frequent conflicts with residents in the area as the oil industry created various negative impacts in peoples’ lives such as gas emissions, growing inequalities and corruption. Once the Assessment was complete, she was hired as part of the company’s new Community Relations Department. The work included grievance management and regular meetings with local stakeholders. She also implemented an extensive community relations programme including agricultural support, and vocational training classes. She stayed in the role of Community Relations Coordinator until she resigned at the end of 2015.

Entering: Navigating symbolic (mis)representations

Entering these industries, the command to perform feminine ‘relational work’ was inscribed in our very job titles, as Relationship Manager and Community Relations Coordinator, and frequently assigned us tasks that required different forms of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983). As young, university educated women, with background in social and cultural studies, we were seen as ideal subjects for this type of work, which included direct communication with foreign clients and the local community as a way of giving the organization a more ‘human’ face, as well as mediating, effectively, between different realms, such as former ‘first’ and ‘second’ worlds.

Author 1 performed this feminine role through meeting clients in Russia and Ukraine, building relationships with these clients though dinners and ‘caring’ about their private lives, with the purpose of getting them to invest with the bank.

A1—I was really good at dealing with the Russian clients. You know private banking is a lot of schmoozing with people to get them to invest with you or to get them to invest more or to recommend other people.

Similarly, Author 2 carried out feminine work through meetings with community members to inform them about company activities, listening to grievances from the community about how company operations affected them, and trying to find solutions that would be accepted by senior management and which would appease aggrieved community members. As argued by Vachhani ‘archetypes of femininity that require women to fulfil roles of empathy or communication reify the very lack of symbolic space Irigaray identifies’ (Vachhani, 2012: 1250). Accordingly, the roles we assumed interpellated us into feminine archetypes while at the same time excluding us from roles connected to ‘having the Phallus’. In these roles we were positioned as feminine collaborators, colluding to maintain an exploitative phallocentric system.

Underlining our roles and positionalities as subordinate collaborators was also the general gendered structure of our organizations, with men in high level positions and women in supporting roles.

A1—There was a rather clear gender division in the company, in that all senior positions were occupied by older British men, while all administrative support was provided by women, most of them in their twenties.

A2—Same here. Finance and HR was where the women worked, and then the Community Relations department where I worked.

The phallocentric symbolic order was thus not only visible through the relational and emotional labour we carried out but also in the gendered structure and division of roles in the organizations in general. This structure, as a symbolic order, highlighted the inaccessibility of higher ranks and their associated wealth. In addition, phallocentrism was inscribed into our very bodies, through dress codes and circulating talk about female bodies in our workplaces.

A1—I’d be in a short skirt or something and then someone at work would just comment and that would just be fine, people would just comment on your level of sexiness. And of course going to Russia again, so you work with wealthy clients who are mostly male. You go into an office of some wealthy Russian businessmen and it’s all women in the administrative side and they all look, you know, like they come out of a fashion magazine.

A2—There was a lot of talking about how sexy female colleagues were among the male colleagues. They would also say things like: ‘If I was the manager, I would have chosen only model girls to work in finance’ or ‘I would never have let so many ugly women into this company, we should be surrounded by models’. And the only women who became bosses, there was always talk about them sleeping with Canadian managers.

The subordination of women in these organizations was thus also connected to the role of ‘woman’ as a symbolic place, a masquerade embodying sex and male desire, one which women enacted, or were encouraged to enact, through their appearance, and which men enforced by their gaze and sexist jargon.

At the same time, what characterized both our stories was the pull of these industries, the promises of these careers in terms of the lure of a highly exclusive world or a career in a ‘global industry’. It promised us a setting in which we could reframe our subject positions as successful workers in a world where we could partake in new ‘adventures’, career advancements and perks. In that way we were offered the traditional subject position of a man, of the subject who is control of his career, his money and his freedom.

A1 ¹ —I had just been looking for jobs, but also I had no formal working experience in the UK. So then they phoned me and said ‘We need a Russian speaker urgently’, that was just so weird to even be like: Someone wants me, after five months of looking for a job. I remember having dinner the same night with some Russian friends and they were like, ‘Oh this is so exciting! This is your way into this world that no one has access to’. So I felt a bit uncomfortable but then I thought: Wow, this is clearly something highly exclusive. I don’t know how it happened with you?

A2—It was a slow process, I met this English consultant, she was ‘out to save the world’, you know. So I think I was a bit, like, amazed by this big system. It seemed so interesting: Wow, and there’s this whole global industry of doing this. So, I don’t think I was very critical from the beginning. I was more like: Wow, this is the kind of job you can do. And then also, because she was talking about human rights, I thought: This is very important, we are the insiders trying to change things.

Looking back at our younger selves it is clear how the combination of being young unemployed ambitious women and being offered opportunities for ‘fulfilment’ in relation to a powerful and prestigious ‘ Other’ was an irresistible combination—a form of seduction. Even though we were critical towards these industries from the beginning, we also express amazement of being able to access new types of success.

Connected to the subject positions of the (masculine) universal worker were salaries, perks and the economic reality of these highly exclusive worlds. One of Karen Ho’s respondents in her ethnography of Wall Street’s financial industry refers to these as ‘intoxicating’ (Ho, 2009: 251).

A2—I guess I didn’t change so much of my lifestyle but still, my mom said ‘you should buy an apartment in Stockholm now’, and I was like, ‘oh, yeah, maybe I should and maybe I could’. And then I realized: I could go on this kind of vacation, and when I walked into these nice stores, previously I always felt uncomfortable walking into nice stores, now I felt like: I can pay for this and then I did feel a little bit more secure.

A1—The ‘Pretty Woman moment’ [laughing]

A2—Yeah, exactly [laughing]

A1—I think I called it, like, the perks in my text. It was so odd to walk into these expensive British restaurants and just be able to order something or go there for lunch. I mean just bizarre. And people would, because they liked my work, buy me gifts like a Hermes scarf. Once my partner bought me a bottle of champagne which felt like ‘a whole bottle of champagne?!’ and then my Russian boss (. . .) bought me a bottle of champagne that cost something like 300 pounds for my birthday. Like wow, it never quite lost this exoticism.

A2—No and because it is also that feeling that you are looking into a different world which is crazy, it’s insane but you also think: It’s very interesting.

These recollections fall in line with McRobbie’s reflections on how ‘post-feminist’ success for young womanhood translates into enabling participation in practices of consumption (McRobbie, 2007, 2016). Prioritization is here given to economic life, whereby the ability to consume signifies access to ‘male’ freedom and choice. ‘I can pay for this’, is a summary of this new feeling of potency and power that these positions and salaries entailed for us.

However, although our conversation indicates an amazement at the new economic realities opened by the job positions, they also show an ambivalence in the way we identify with these as ‘universal workers’. The reference to ‘pretty woman’ is not that of a man earning his own money but that of a sex worker who can go shopping because she embodies male desire successfully. Similarly, the access to perks are referred to in terms of gifts from men. When Author 2 describes the feeling of ‘looking into a different world’ it is not that of the successful man who as assumed his position in power but that of an outsider who has been offered an accidental glimpse inside the castle. Similarly, when Author 1 reacts to a job offering with thinking that ‘someone wants me’, it is not that of a career man in charge but that of an object fulfilling the desire of the Other.

As these conversations show, our entry into these organizational cultures and industries was a process in which our subject positions in the symbolic order were reshaped and challenged in relation to the new social setting. By limiting our analysis to the positions of being or having the Phallus, we acknowledge the deeply gendered nature of these industries and the limited subject positions that were available to us either as a subordinate emotional worker or as a castrated successful man. In this limited phallocentric symbolic universe, feelings of anxiety, depression and lack frequently took hold of us. In the next section, we describe how we managed to stay in our roles through mobilizations in the imaginary order, where fantasies of being an insider critic or passionate worker kept us going.

Staying: Imaginaries and modes of existence

In this section we examine how our unfulfilled desire of belonging and recognition produced fantasies which kept us going in our work. The fantasy of being a ‘critic’ who remained somewhat outside emerged in our emphasis on how we ended up in these industries ‘by accident’, how we were always critical about them and thus remained ‘outsiders’ throughout, from entering to leaving. By understanding our positions as being the ‘other’ in the organization, the fantasy of the critic becomes visible as a strategy to cope with one’s exclusion and subordination. Our sense of ‘outsiderness’, while working to increase efficiency in these organizations, was heightened through small acts of transgression and a sense of being different from other actors in the organization.

A2—I was very outspoken, I was writing really angry emails to everyone about how ‘people are suffering in there’.

A1—So I would make quite critical jokes, and things like that.I would be able to say things that other people wouldn’t. But of course that’s a whole fantasy of, again, in my case I think it’s a mixture of I’m not like all of these company dummies, but also I’m special.

A2—I think that being special is something that goes through both of our stories. I could criticize the company or tell critical things to consultants. It made me feel special, but it also made me good at that job.

As shown in our conversation, our enjoyment as ‘critics’ was connected to fantasies about our own ‘specialness’, as being superior to others in the organization. Through transgressive acts and the fantasmatic narratives behind them, we sustained our ideal position of the critic and outsider to keep functioning in phallocentric industries we recognized as deeply flawed and in which we were subordinated. Similarly, Fotaki show in her study of women in academia how experiences of othering lead to feelings of being an ‘outsider’ and not fitting in. ‘If women identify with their body they will be left outside the dominant male symbolic order’ (Fotaki, 2013: 1267). While men in these industries could openly desire higher ranking roles, as women we were limited to positions of servicing and support, to female bodies performing emotional labour. By imagining ourselves as critics, we could cover over the sense of loss that such exclusion might have produced. Instead, there was a clear sense of enjoyment of being a renegade now invited into fancy board rooms.

While there were aspects of our work which spoke directly to the narcissistic high performing careerists inside us and pulled us into a position of the universal worker through perks and salaries, as women, we were also continuously reduced to our gendered identities and -bodies. Through mobilizing the image of the ’career woman’ we then merged the sense of success and passionate work with that of the universal worker encompassed within the female body.

A1—I guess we had this sort of idea that we could do it. It seemed to me like you could be good at your job, you could also be the one who actually makes a life in Albania work, who bridges all these cultural gaps, who has fun, works hard, plays hard.

A2—Yes.

A1—For me I guess it was like: I can be good at whatever I do, and it’s important that I’m good at what I do, even if I don’t believe in it, I still have to feel like I’m potentially one of the best, like all my little transgressions made me better at the job because I was more flexible.

The idea of being a high performing ‘universal’ worker is similar to the ‘new model worker’ which Cederström and Grassman (2010) write about: ‘he is his own boss, controlling his own destiny, and his entire being is geared towards happiness and subjective well-being’ (p. 101). Even though this universal ‘model worker’ is based on a male stereotype, the ‘career woman’, shares many similarities with this role. She is successful, critical, transgressive, and creative. She does not serve an organization but her own happiness. She can ‘do it all’. In addition, like the male ‘model worker’, the ‘career woman’ has no family attachment, is able to travel flexibly and work extended hours. In that way the ‘career woman’ is actually a male worker in a female body.

At the same time, the ‘career woman’ is also feminine. As emphasized by McRobbie (2026) the ‘post-feminist masquerade’ operates as a tool to symbolize the non-threatening character of female success. Seeing ourselves as transgressive, we both refused some aspects of the feminine masquerade giving us yet another sense of specialness. This is shown in our discussion of our female colleagues, which we picture as distinct from us in that they fully embraced masquerading as ‘women’ while we did so hesitantly, and unsuccessfully.

A1— ‘They all wore makeup, and they all wore heels, everyone wore heels, apart from me, sometimes I would wear heels too, can you imagine?’

A2— ‘They went to the hairdresser before they went to work sometimes, I think, and yeah nails and everything. I couldn’t even if I tried, I would not be able to dress like that, it’s impossible, my hair doesn’t do that shine. But still of course I tried, you know, I bought some office pants and a shirt’.

Refusing to follow the organizational norms about how a woman should dress gave us yet another sense of being special and ‘outsmarting’ the organization. We both discuss how female dressing gave male colleagues the right to comment on female colleagues’ ‘sexiness’ and thus dressing down was a way for us to maintain control and continuing performing as a successful transgressive worker. However, in retrospect it is clear how we both had to relate to the aesthetic ideal of the career woman and the organizational discourses surrounding her success—the ‘bodily techniques’ (Ho, 2009: 41) which signal and reinforce hierarchies without needing to be avowed. After all, our continued participation in processes of gendering, even though they may have somewhat deviated from the norm, enforced our non-threatening positions as subordinated labourers, as ‘career women’ in a phallocentric order.

Lastly, in these sexist environments, our female bodies also pulled us into spaces of female solidarity, spaces where we could enjoy our presence in the organization by finding a site free of sexist talk and in which our subordination was the norm, as all of us were enmeshed in organizational discourses that ‘reinforce woman as lack’.

A2—My closest colleagues and friends were Albanian female employees in my age who I had most in common with. We exercised Zumba and yoga together, went out for drinks and dinners.

A1—Finding myself among them also meant establishing a wonderful sense of camaraderie and fun, in a way that soon spilled into my personal life as well. Their friendship made the existence there joyful and even hilarious at times, so that my identification with the work at times became identifying with them.

Such places of ‘subversive femininity’ offered by the gendered organization were not enacted for male co-workers but functioned as sites of fun and minor rebellion. However, we would later grow suspicious of some of these positive recollections, seeing positive affect through bonding among the (junior) female staff as means in which we continued to enjoy our work and remained loyal to the workplace, and which was hence encouraged or co-opted by the organizations. In addition, it is clear how our social networks remained subordinate to the power structures of the organizations, thus not providing the ground for career opportunities or more influence over organizational practices which similar male networks would.

In summary, our choices between embracing the feminine role of the emotional worker or the masculine role of the universal worker were continuously re-enacted through fantasies of being critical and unique or someone who were in control, passionate about their work and could ‘do it all’. Even as we told ourselves that we ‘chose’ our practices, our gendered bodies interpellated us as women in various ways enforcing our sense of ‘otherness’ to these organizations. While this otherness could be partially dealt with through fantasies of being critical, unique and in control as well as through female solidarity, there came affective moments in both our stories where the othering was experienced as violence to our bodies. In these moments, the affective tightrope we had been clinging to could no longer support the weight of your experiences.

Exit: Experiences of the real

While we have so far examined our experiences in terms of the symbolic (mis)representations that were available to us as well as the imaginaries that helped us cope with failures in the Symbolic, in this final section we discuss how feelings of anxiety and despair continued to overwhelm us, pushing us to affective states that caused us to quit.

A1—I remember at some point would lying awake at night and thinking like God, this is so meaningless but what else am I going to do?

A2—I think I was miserable the whole time. I didn’t know it then. I came from being a student in Sweden, I was very protected, and I came into a very harsh environment and it stressed me a lot. So I’m happy I got out of it. It took me a year in Sweden before I realized: Wow, I was really miserable there.

The meaningless and harmful work we carried out made us slide into forms of depression or melancholia, coupled with episodes of anger. Finally, our gendered bodies were implicated in affective moments when our bodies were reacting in forceful ways, followed by a complete break of trust in our superiors and eventually led to us leaving these industries. Lacan conceptualizes the Real as situated beyond the Symbolic and Imaginary, as something only perceived in the breakdown of these orders (1977/1981: 26). Accordingly, we see these as moments of being radically torn out of symbolic and imaginary identifications into moments of acute transformation.

In Author 1’s case this was linked to an experience of sexual harassment by a client, with her line manager present yet not intervening.

A1—Shortly after the incident we had a meeting together and I just said that ‘I cannot speak to this client again’, and my manager said ‘You have to, this is what happens, this is just part of your job, this is something to be expected. And it was kind of your fault that it happened’ because of the way I handled the situation or whatever. So, after that I literally felt like someone had punched me in the stomach and I was so angry, crying.

The final moment of rupture came when Author 1 was forced to go on another business trip with the line manager.

A1—I got to the airport and I started having like heart palpitations and I called a doctor because I thought that this was a heart attack, of course, it was a panic attack, but I’d never had a panic attack before, I think at this point my body was like: Okay you really shouldn’t be working for them anymore. Shortly after that I quit.

In Author 2’s case, her work in community relations finally became too much to handle emotionally when a gas incident happened in one village and people were very close to getting seriously injured.

A2—One day when they were drilling a new well and they hit a gas pocket and it exploded into the water layer of the village and all the water wells went up like huge fountains several hundred meters high. As ‘community relations’ we went to the village and it was completely crazy, people crying everywhere, it was bubbling in all the channels, people were super scared. When we came back to the office the whole Senior Management had closed themselves into a little room and they sat there and tried to think about what to do. After that I was like: I won’t believe anything they say, it was so close to someone getting really hurt. When you experience something like this, it’s like your body is saying to you like: this is not right.

In both our stories, the industries we worked for operated by doing harm to subordinate bodies either through expecting women to deal with sexual harassment as part of the job or through accepting oil extraction activities, with the risk of dangerous accidents in vicinity to residential areas. At the same time, it was through our bodies and their responses that we could finally resist the fantasmatic narratives that had kept us working within these environments. Shortly after these incidents occurred, we both resigned from our positions.

The traumatic events we retell as causing our exit were moments when we were brutally exposed as subordinate insiders and thus when our fantasmatic images of being a ‘critic’, (and special), or a ‘career woman’ (in terms of being committed and in control) failed. The events exposed us as different from those in organizational power and as subordinated to those who placed ours and other subordinate bodies at risk. In A1′s case this happened through a male manager stating that she should accept sexual harassment from a male client as part of her job. This exposed her as a ‘woman’ in a traumatizing manner, despite previous attempts to not follow the female norm through other transgressions. In A2′s case it was the men in the boardroom, kept safe from the workings of the gas incident, that exposed her to her subordination in the organization, as someone walking among other subordinate bodies (‘othered’ through ethnicity or gender) in the village were the gas leakage was exposing them to life threatening risk. In these moments, the Real was sensed in terms of anxiety, bodily reactions, as a breakdown of the symbolic order and our fantasmatic survival strategies. The incidents confirmed what our constant feelings of anxiety and despair had tried to tell us all along, that we were subordinate bodies in the service of exploitative industries, exposed to risks that could at any moment make us abject if we were not abiding by their rules.

Discussion and conclusions

As argued by Rose, Lacan emphasizes that the focus of psychoanalysis should not be ‘to produce “male” and “female” as complementary entities, sure of each other and of their own identity, but should expose the fantasy on which this notion rests’ (Rose, 1982: 33). Summarizing the analysis of our experiences above, one can see how the identificatory processes we were involved in included an oscillation between the two positions of being the phallus (as a feminine emotional worker) and having the phallus (as a masculine universal worker) and a constant failure to embody either position leading to fantasmatic narratives of the self which also eventually failed. Our identificatory processes as young professionals can thus only be fully grasped if placed within a symbolic order structured according to sexual difference. Our main contribution to the literature on Lacanian approaches to identification is thus to highlight experientially and analytically what others have emphasized before us (Fotaki and Harding, 2018; Vachhani, 2012): that attention to sexual difference is key for understanding how subjectivities move between symbolic and imaginary orders, and how experiences of the real are formed. This has important implications for how resistance to hegemonic (phallocentric) orders can be articulated and understood.

Impossible subject positions and failing imaginaries

The emotional worker was the female position which drew us into these industries in the first place. In organizational structures and cultures which was highly gendered in terms of hierarchies, salaries, dress codes and jargon, these positions placed us in subordinated roles as ‘others’, as colluders in an overall exploitative and phallocentric structure, where the feminine positions we embodied ensured the male order as dominant. The universal worker needs the subordinated (feminine) emotional worker in order to exist and succeed. This fundamental experience of being othered and subordinated led to various and conflicting feelings and strategies on our part.

One strategy was to engage in fantasies of the ‘career woman’, of delivering and performing. This was linked to feelings of success, of being in control, being able to ‘do it all’. In line with what others have shown, this underlines the importance of affect for understanding workers’ connections to neoliberal ideologies such as ‘love for one’s work’ in capitalist workplaces (Ö Zdemir Kaya and Fotaki, 2023a). However, coupled with an attachment to the identity of ‘career woman’ was also a sense of failure for not being able muster sufficient passion. Being ashamed of where and how we worked and not ‘finding pleasure at work’ (McRobbie, 2016: 292) became a threat to our identities as being ambitious career women, passionate workers who could ‘do it all’. Another strategy was thus to resist our subordinate roles by imagining ourselves as critics, enjoying our positions as outsiders, not truly part of the organization. This provided us with means to not desire the enormous wealth and exclusivity that the industries promise to successful workers. Instead, we could remain in our subordinate positions as if they were our own choice, never striving for what our male colleagues achieved.

Failure as a place for resistance

Ultimate rupture with the organizations occurred when lingering tensions, along with external events that placed ourselves or others at risk, led to somatic responses, and showed how our imaginaries proved to have outlived their utility. The extractive and predatory logics of capitalism thus showed themselves by doing violence to bodies (including our own) defined as ‘other’, or as expendable. These experiences demonstrate that bodies can be true places of resistance, breaking the fantasmatic narratives that kept us working for an order which we could not comfortably tolerate. However, our initial sense of outsider-ness may have also served as a protective measure, saving us from fully internalizing failures to live up to neoliberal ideals of passionate work, or our inability to ever fully inhabit the space of the ‘universal worker’. This is what makes the failure of identification so important, in line with Driver’s findings (2002, 2023). Unconsciously, it represents the possibility of dis-identification, which in turn might be a step towards collective forms of re-signification. The outsider-ness imposed on us by these organizations, through our bodies as women, was thus also a signifying mechanism that allowed us to resist and leave.

This raises the question whether leaving was the only form of resistance available to us. As Hoedemaekers emphasizes: ‘Identity is by its very nature a flawed and incomplete process, and the determining/constitutive influence of managerial discourses is therefore by definition a partial failure. As a result, effective resistance becomes a question of capitalizing on these failures’ (2010: 391). For women, who hold a negative place in phallocentric symbolic orders, capitalizing on these failures means capitalizing on the fact that woman is defined as lack. The question is then, as formulated by Rose, ‘whether women might, as a very effect of that assignation, break against and beyond that system itself’ (Rose, 1982: 52). This brings us to the quest for female desire, or a subject position beyond the Phallus.

Female desire and subjectivity beyond the P hallus

While useful for our analysis above, relying on Lacan’s framework of sexual difference also leaves us with a claustrophobic feeling, similar to what we experienced when working for these organizations. Exiting then appears as the only option for female emancipation in a closed phallocentric universe. On the other hand, as Lacan points to symbolic and imaginary failures as silences (Lacan, 1977: 26), they can be thought of as places beyond language, beyond a phallocentric order, as places where female desire can be expressed. As emphasized by Irigaray: ‘Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s’ (1977/1985: 25). However, to fill such silences with alternative subjectivities, other frameworks are needed. Thus, while the Lacanian framework has provided a useful lens for highlighting identity work as intimately connected to sexual difference, female desire and what it can be, outside the phallocentric order, requires other (feminist) frameworks, such as the strategic essentialism developed by Irigaray (1977/1985). In addition, as others have pointed out, female desire and emancipation can only be sought through relationships with others, as a relational and ethical practice (Fotaki and Harding, 2018; Kenny and Fotaki, 2015; Pullen et al., 2017; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015) underlining the importance of intracorporeal transmission of affect organization (Fotaki et al., 2017). It is noteworthy that both our accounts of organizational pasts included spaces of female solidarity, spaces where rebellious thoughts and minor resistance could flourish in collaboration with other women. Looking back at our analytical work behind this text, we can see how processes of transference (of those past relationships to our current one) were present, creating a familiar space of female trust and solidarity with each other, in our past and present roles. This highlights how experiences of gendering and otherness can be brought to light through processes of transference and counter-transference and how solidarity towards others can be extended as a result. Female desire may be sought in such connections of solidarity, in connecting with the silences of ‘othered’ subjects, and in examining our own desire as we seek to understand theirs.