Summarize

DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12338

A N N I V E R S A R Y I S S U E A R T I C L E

Gender still at work: Interrogating identity in discourses and practices of masculinity

David Knights

Department of Organization, Work and

Technology, Lancaster University

Management School

Correspondence

David Knights, Department of Organization,

Work and Technology, Lancaster University of

Management, Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK

Email: [email protected]

Special Issue to celebrate the 25th anniversary of G

I acknowledge the helpful comments of Alison Pul

18 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd w

Apart from a few paragraphs reminiscing on how, in

response to a publisher contacting us, Jill, Marilyn and I

founded Gender, Work and Organization combined with a

few comments on its evolution as a leading journal in our

field, this article largely summarizes and seeks to develop

my lifelong interests in discourses and practices of mascu-

linity. It pays tribute to my doctoral students and/or

research colleagues with whom many of these ideas

concerning masculinities were shaped. The article then sur-

veys the literature on discourses and practices of

masculinities through the three waves: the unitarist, the plu-

ralist and, finally, the performativist approach to discourses

and practices of masculinity. A central argument of the arti-

cle is that although each wave has contributed something of

importance to the critical examination of masculinities, none

of them fully interrogate identity to theorize how our

attachment to the security that it promises is illusory.

Posthumanist feminists come closest to realizing this and

seeking an alternative embodied and ethical engagement

with, rather than a competitive elevation of self over, the

other. In the conclusion, there is a brief comment on how

the global backlash from the political right has made strug-

gles against dominant masculinities all the more urgent.

KEYWORDS

feminism, identity, masculinities, performativity, posthumanism

ender, Work and Organization

len in developing this article.

Gender Work Organ. 2019;26:18–30.ileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gwao

KNIGHTS 19

1 | INTRODUCTION

Although this article is partly a nostalgic1 rumination on a long period of my involvement with Gender, Work and Orga-

nization, I am also using this occasion of the 25th anniversary of the journal as an opportunity to reflect on the gender

issues that have most inspired me during a lengthy academic career. Although having an interest in a broad range of

topics that lie beyond the field of gender studies, a good proportion of my research has focused extensively on equal

opportunity, sex discrimination, sex inequality as well as other forms of diversity discrimination. However, my stron-

gest focus in this field has been on discourses and practices of masculinity. Theoretically, this focus has revolved

around poststructuralist and posthumanist feminism (Knights, 2000, 2006; Knights & Kerfoot, 2004), first through

theorizing identity and power (Knights & Roberts, 1982; Knights & Willmott, 1985) and then developing critical dis-

courses of masculinity. In particular, a target has been the limited degree of interrogation around notions of identity

(Knights & Clarke, 2017) and especially in relation to discourses and practices of masculinity (Clarke & Knights,

2018b; Collinson, Knights, & Collinson, 1990; Knights, 2015; Knights & Collinson, 1987; Knights & Murray, 1994;

Knights & Tullberg, 2012).

As a co‐founder and co‐editor for most of the 25 years that this special issue now celebrates, I feel obliged to

begin the article with a brief history of the journal, although clearly my colleagues may offer different interpretations.

After this, the article turns to the topic within gender studies which has most occupied my attention — discourses and

practices of masculinity. In this section, I begin by providing a selective account of the masculinity literature in what

are generally recognized as its three stages or waves, and where each focus a great deal of attention on identity. In

the final section of the article, attention is drawn to the limited interrogation of identity that these three waves

accomplish and I make some attempt to make up for the shortfall through developing the embryonic, posthumanist

elements of performative theory and their relevance for reflecting on masculine identities. Before discussing mascu-

line discourses and practices, however, I turn to my recollections of the early formation and development of the jour-

nal, Gender, Work and Organization. I realize that it may seem self‐contradictory if not self‐indulgent writing an article

about my experience editing the journal and interests in masculinities when I am also seeking to challenge our pre-

occupation with, and attachment to, identity. Having been asked by a new and exciting editorial team to make such

a contribution, however, I felt it would have been churlish to refuse. At the same time, I am always aware that what

we write about is usually a reflection of contradictions we identify more readily in others than in ourselves but I need

to admit that my preoccupation with masculinities and with interrogating the attachment to identity does not render

me free of falling into their traps.

2 | RECOLLECTIONS OF THE GENESIS OF GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

In 1993, Marilyn Davidson, Jill Rubery and I were approached by Basil Blackwell to see if we were interested in

establishing a new personnel/human resource management journal relating to women in employment. The Blackwell

representatives wanted a journal that could secure a readership not just from academics but also among practising

personnel managers. Marilyn took a back seat in the negotiations largely because she was already editing another

journal in this field so felt there would have been a conflict of interest. I felt that a journal of the kind they proposed

would end up being much like Personnel Review but with a focus on women. Since that journal never attained an

academic reputation, we argued that our interest would only be in establishing a fully refereed, international aca-

demic journal.

After several negotiations, Blackwell conceded that a journal called Gender, Work and Organization had potential

for them. We had some discussions around the title and especially using the singular term organization rather than

organizations, which commonsensically might have seemed more appropriate. I wanted the singular term to convey

the dynamic and processual nature of organizing rather than the concrete sense of our topic being the finite entities

20 KNIGHTS

known as organizations. Jill as a labour economist and I as an organization theorist sought to focus on these two

fields and this transpired, with us as joint editors‐in‐chief. After Jill resigned ten years after its inception, and Deborah

Kerfoot was recruited to replace her, the focus became more organization and gender theory although it has sought

to retain some of its earlier multi‐disciplinary credentials. In the early days, finding enough copy to run four issues per

year was a challenge but later, partly because of its growing reputation in the journal rankings but also due to us orga-

nizing a biennial conference, selection and rejection became the major task for the editors. While the journal had

been based in Manchester University where Jill and I both worked, in 2004 it was moved to Keele University where,

by this time, both Deborah and I worked and it remained there until the recent editorial changes. A majority of the

conferences were also held in Keele where Deborah and Nicola Nixon, the assistant to the editors, were largely

responsible for their organization but in 2018 the conference moved to Macquarie University in Sydney where it

was organized by Alison Pullen. Unfortunately, due to a variety of circumstances, not least of which was recent major

heart surgery, I was unable to attend but all reports suggest it was a roaring success in the new venue.

Turning back to these earlier developments, in order to accommodate the growing volume of submissions, the

journal moved to five issues per year in 2002 and then to six issues per year in 2004 and added a third editor‐in‐chief

— Ida Sabelis in 2011. Most recently, we have seen a radical overhaul of the journal under three new editors —

Patricia Lewis, Alison Pullen and Banu Ozkazanc‐Pan — respectively replacing Deborah, myself and Ida. While the

journal has always supported empirical research, it has expected authors to present their work not merely in descrip-

tive terms but to be strongly theoretically informed so that data advances thinking either conceptually, epistemolog-

ically or methodologically and preferably in all three ways. While multi‐disciplinary, a majority of contributions have

drawn principally on sociological and gender/feminist theory, but since the journal and its biennial conference were

founded in a management school, associated subdisciplines such as human resource management, industrial relations,

labour economics and organization studies have been heavily represented. It has also engaged with a broad body of

international scholarship that seeks to extend beyond traditional binaries, whether in relation to gender or other

aspects of inequality as long as they were broadly within the field of work and organization.

While there were serendipitous conditions leading to my interest in gender due not least to a request by the

Equal Opportunities Commission inviting me to bid for a grant to study sex discrimination in recruitment (Equal

Opportunities Commission, 1983), the achievement of which funded my doctoral student David Collinson as a

research assistant, eventually resulting in the book Managing to Discriminate (Collinson et al., 1990). Prior to this, I

had focused on all aspects of social inequality in my teaching and had co‐led a research project on racial discrimina-

tion in employment (Department of Employment, 1979; Torrington, Hitner, & Knights, 1982). However, an interest in

issues of masculinity had already begun before the research grant largely through David Collinson who had focused

on this in his master's research (Collinson, 1992; Knights & Collinson, 1987) but also sustained through collaboration

with my doctoral students Andrew Sturdy (Knights & Collinson, 1987) and Deborah Kerfoot (Kerfoot & Knights,

1992, 1993, 1994). This concern to investigate and theorize discourses and practices of masculinity continued to a

lesser degree with research assistants Fergus Murray (Knights & Murray, 1994) and Darren McCabe (Knights &

McCabe, 2001, 2015), and then contemporarily with my colleagues Torkild Thanem (Knights & Thanem, 2011; Thanem

& Knights, 2012), Maria Tullberg (Knights & Tullberg, 2012, 2014), Caroline Clarke (Clarke & Knights, 2014, 2018a,

2018b; Knights & Clarke, 2017, 2018) and Alison Pullen (Knights & Pullen, 2019; Pullen & Knights, 2007).

3 | MASCULINE LITERATURES

It could be argued that few literatures are devoid of masculine sensibilities since gender is as old as human existence

itself and therefore all discourses are gendered in one way or another. Indeed, there have been several books written

on the masculine aspects of medieval life and literature (Vaught, 2008) but, in general, they remain descriptive of

their subject matter. Moving much nearer to our own day, analyses of 19th‐century middle‐class life have suggested

that the Victorian domestic family was as great a benefit to men as to women (Tosh, 2002) because it provided an

KNIGHTS 21

orderly, moral, religious and stable space or platform from which men were able to pursue their masculine activities

whether in the field of adventure, commerce, manufacture or sexual exploits. But while the idea of manliness was to

‘maintain the family’ and ‘provide for dependents’, men often ‘depended on the capital, labour and contacts of their

wives’ (Davidoff & Hall, 2002, p. xv). However, this was as much a class as gender mode of organizing since it was a

life opposed to what was seen to be ‘an indolent and dissolute aristocracy, and a potentially subversive working class’

(p. xviii). In the modern era, by contrast, there has been a considered attempt to examine and analyse concepts, the-

ories and practices of masculinity but these have a comparatively short history beginning in the 1970s, although

some (e.g., Roper, 1994; Roper & Tosh, 1991) have taken their analyses of masculinity back as far as 1800. I now pro-

vide a very brief synopsis on the three waves of this analytical literature on masculinity but focus more intensively on

the third poststructuralist wave where within the performative turn I see some potential to interrogate masculine

identity more fully.

4 | THE THREE WAVES OF MASCULINITY

It is well known that the literature on masculinity has passed through different phases or waves,2 the first of which

drew largely on role theory and was functionalist in approach, arguing that the decline of manufacturing had created

a crisis of masculinity as male manual workers began to suffer increasing levels of unemployment. Potentially they

lost the sense of being in the commanding heights of the household as breadwinners,3 but also began to feel alien-

ated from other men and from the natural world which, some of this literature argues, had traditionally been the loca-

tion for manifesting their manly instincts for survival through hunting, fishing and shooting.

This early literature concentrated on a unitary conception of men as suffering a crisis in having lost the sense of

what it was to be a man — tough, physical and independent — that modernity, combined with feminist liberation

movements, were seen to have eroded (Farrell, 1993). Within this phase there was a hand‐wringing, men's movement

that often self‐pityingly drew attention to the impossibility of living up to the expectations of the 20th century and a

yearning to return to a mythical past of ‘Wild Man’ basic living through bonding with other men and nature (Bly,

1990; Keen, 1991). Most authors, however, did not participate in this movement but subscribed to an approach

where men's masculinity was seen as a one‐dimensional product of socialization that although, socially privileged

over femininities, involved expectations of competence in all spheres of personal and public activity. While still

experiencing expectations of maintaining the household, fulfilling demands of economic provision, and displaying

rational decisiveness and ‘strength’, they felt encroachments or even erosions of their authority as a result of feminist

threats. The demands of masculinity were not just limiting and negative for men in the sense of being often unattain-

able but also for women in legitimating and reproducing the existing system of gender inequality (Goldberg, 1976;

Tolson, 1977). Not fully in control, men nonetheless were depicted as incapable of expressing their feelings and emo-

tions until this wave of masculine discourse provided them with a platform or some legitimacy to release, or even

wallow in, their pent‐up anxieties. However, whatever version of this literature was subscribed to, there seemed

to be some yearning for a past masculine identity of hierarchical supremacy where men were men and women were

women or at least when there were fewer conflicting expectations about their respective roles in society. This overall

concern to maintain or return to an established, status quo order meant that while identity was of central focus, it

remained taken for granted rather than interrogated.

Criticizing this universal and unitary account as mythical, the second wave described the situation as one where a

multiplicity of divergent masculinities (Brittan, 1989; Connell, 1995) coincided to generate a diverse range of experi-

ences across class, racial and ethnic lines (Mercer & Julien, 1988) or in relation to diverse circumstances. In the first

wave, for example, there had been little consideration of how men experienced and lived their masculinity at differ-

ent stages of their life (Calasanti, 2004) or in different geographical regions (Gilmore, 1990). This recognition of

diverse and multiple masculinities became the distinctive mark of the second wave and it resonated with views that

the failure to recognize the complexities and differences amongst men had generated a skewed analysis of social

22 KNIGHTS

relations and a politics of gender in which all men were pitted against all women. Nonetheless, it still needed to be

recognized that despite the variability, there remained some shared cultural and historical characteristics that were

distinctive to discourses and practices of masculinity (Knights & Kerfoot, 2004).

So, for example, regardless of their differences, masculinities tend to be identified with reason (Seidler, 1989) and

this often results in emotional estrangement, leaving men as subjects with minimal resources for expressing feelings

and often unable to acknowledge weakness or failure. This means that they are inescapably caught up in their own

power to demonstrate competence in conquering and controlling a multiplicity of tasks with which they are

confronted (Kerfoot & Knights, 1992, 1993). Although here acknowledging some of the anxieties around masculinity

within the first wave, this literature differs in regard to how these problems might be resolved. Refraining from the

self‐obsessed nature of the earlier research or seeking to retrieve for men a past in which their sense of self was tied

to physical relations with nature and bonding with other men, much of the second wave sought to transform men in

ways more appropriate to the sensibilities and understandings demanded of a rapidly developing feminist reality.

Men's awareness groups sprang up where the objective was to raise self‐consciousness to realize the subconscious

propensity for sexist and homophobic attitudes and behaviour to occur even when fully familiar with and sympa-

thetic to the feminist and gay cause (Pease, 2000; Schein, 1977). While believing it necessary to interrogate mascu-

line subjectivity, this literature rarely extends beyond examining how men's so‐called needs and desires contradict

their new‐found ethics, grounded in pro‐feminist or pro‐gay sensibilities.

Besides acknowledging how masculinities are multiple and shifting depending on different contexts, authors also

sought to develop a more political and pro‐feminist stance (Kimmel, Hearn, & Connell, 2004). So, in contrast to the

first wave that was threatened by feminism, here there was political support for radical change and often attempts

to challenge not only the explicit, but also the implicit subconscious, assumptions of misogyny, sexism and homopho-

bia. While continuing to share with the first wave the elements of crisis within masculine senses of subjectivity, the

literature here is much more scholarly in seeing the ascription of masculine as only one condition in living up to the

image of what it is to be ‘a man’. However, it does focus on the ongoing struggles to appear competent, competitive

and in control of situations where feelings of doubt and vulnerability prevail regardless, or because, of asserting a

claim to masculinity (Seidler, 1989). Moreover, as with the first wave, there was always a danger of men self‐indul-

gently wallowing in their own anguish and distress while neglecting to acknowledge the continuing gender advan-

tages of being male and that although the old industrial order had declined, it had facilitated numerous service

sector opportunities where men as well as women benefited (Edwards, 2006).

Despite the general critique of the unitary conception of masculinity in earlier writings, with limited exceptions

(Connell, 1995; Pease, 2000), the second wave has tended also to be restricted by its concentration on a white, het-

erosexual model of masculinity that could have been avoided had it not ignored the work accomplished within ‘cul-

tural, literary and media‐driven studies’ (Edwards, 2006, p. 3). Other criticisms directed at the second wave were that

again with few exceptions (e.g., Connell, 1995; Pease, 2000), there was no significant contribution to empirical

research of the field and although much of the literature recognized the performative nature of masculinity, rarely

was this theorized (Edwards, 2006, p. 107). As a consequence, while clearly the conception of identity subscribed

to was much more complex, diverse and nuanced than in the first wave, and certainly it acknowledged the multiplicity

of masculinities and differences between men (Pease, 2000), theory still drew on structural arguments that relied on

universal and totalizing concepts such as patriarchy or hegemony, the construction and variation of which were often

left unchallenged resulting in the ‘reification of masculinity’ (Edwards, 2006, p. 107). More importantly for my pur-

poses, identity was continually taken for granted as a substantive, albeit symbolic, reality rather than interrogated

so as to challenge its potential to be oppressive.

Paralleling the third phase of feminism, drawing on the philosophical strains of poststructuralism, postmodernism

and cultural analysis, a third wave then followed that sought to advance more theoretical understandings of

masculinities through an examination of power and subjectivity. More particularly, it has sought to engage with fem-

inist advocacies of queer theory and theories of performativity, where the prevalence of heterosexual discourses that

reflect and reinforce dominant heteronormative values are challenged (Butler, 1990). This broader, more multi‐

KNIGHTS 23

disciplinary approach combined with the queering of conventional sexual binaries, challenges the heterosexual pre-

suppositions of gender discourse (Butler, 1990), thus giving more attention to trans, gay and androgynous norms

and practices. Here, masculinities are understood as identity performances or more correctly performative occasions

that have a series of effects in that actions such as walking, working and playing or speaking and other communica-

tions and interactions all are conducted ‘in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man’ (Butler, 2011).4 Con-

sequently, masculinity is seen not as a property of any person(s) for it is recognized as a performative phenomenon

that has continually to be produced and reproduced in processes where social relations are accomplished in orga-

nized situations. Nonetheless, these performatives have a series of effects that sustain some sense of a gender order

but equally can be disrupted when, for example, the performance breaches binary norms of masculinity and feminin-

ity. However, as in all good dramas, sincere performances transform norms, such that disruptions of convention are

readily accommodated, routinely becoming normalized and legitimized.

By adopting Butler's theory of performativity and Foucauldian analytics, the third wave has tended to eschew

grand narratives and totalizing universals. In the context of work and organization, it advances an understanding of

power as a social process that classifies, distinguishes and divides individuals from one another (Foucault, 1982), and

reconstitutes masculine subjects through their attachment to a particular manner of rendering the world controllable

and ordered. But this power is seen to exist in its exercise, operating through the production of particular knowledges

— around discourses of gender and sexuality, pleasure and morality, sanity and madness, and the law and ethics, for

example. From this perspective, power is neither one‐directional, nor does it flow from a single source to shape, direct

or constrain subjects. Rather, power is in reciprocal relation to a subjectivity that can be defined as individual self‐con-

sciousness inscribed in particular ideals of behaviour surrounding categories of persons, objects, practices or institu-

tions. Subjectivity is then constituted through the exercise of power within which conceptions of identity, gender

and sexuality come to be generated. This is not a determinate process, for individuals actively exercise power in posi-

tioning themselves within, or of finding their own location amongst, competing discourses, rather than merely being

‘positioned by’ them (Knights & Kerfoot, 2004). However, rather than theorize performativity, much of the third wave

literature has merely sought to demonstrate it through metrosexual examples of consumption, dress, fashion and life-

style, or in terms of their gender sensibility in analyses of that relic of gender history — the ‘New Man’ (Woodruffe‐Bur-

ton, 1998), described by Giles Coren in 2014, as now a ‘cartoon‐like figure of fun’.5

These examinations of masculine performances have tended, however, to neglect the ‘material, economic and

physical foundations of identity and identity politics and indeed power itself’ (Edwards, 2006, p. 103). While not explic-

itly showing how these foundations can be explored other than through an extension of the sociology of the body to

incorporate the analysis of masculinity (p. 151), Edwards’ own analysis of the body is restrained by a fear of sliding into

biological essentialism should any credence be given to bodily agency. However, ascribing agency to bodies involves a

biological determinism only if there is an assumption of a separation between mind and body whereas drawing on

Spinozian philosophy, a unitary ontology avoids this problem since body and mind are one and the same (Spinoza,

1985). Human agency cannot then be other than material and symbolic action that reflects, and reproduces, embodied

cognition which is a combined effect of deconstructing epistemological and dissolving ontological binaries (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1988; Knights, 2015). Consequently, the material and economic foundations of identity in relation to

masculinities still remain under‐researched but the contemporary backlash against the neoliberal consensus in global

politics suggests a link between material and economic deprivation and an aggressive masculine intolerance of differ-

ence. Moreover, this straddles the genders since women are as likely as men to embrace a ‘hard line’ masculine aggres-

sion towards outsiders in the new right politics of identity surrounding nationalism and economic protectionism.

While these examinations of masculinities in terms of consumption, style and the body or in relation to a politics

of identity are important in providing examples of masculine performances, they do not interrogate identity in ways

that would provide an analysis of what drives the desire to perform. Even when books are devoted exclusively to the

subject matter of identity (Fukuyama, 2018), they still have a tendency to treat it as a resource rather than a topic to

interrogate. So, for example, Fukuyama (2018, p. iii) argues that the ‘demand for recognition of one's identity is a

master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today’, including the shift on the part of many

24 KNIGHTS

white American, British and European populations to demand anti‐immigration, nationalist and protectionist policies

through supporting political leaders from the ‘extreme right’ who often appear to be authoritarian demagogues.

Although sometimes as crude as the politics this analysis is explaining, it is not without credibility. However, it

remains at the level of describing, rather than interrogating identity and its performative foundations and, thereby,

it adds little to developing an understanding of masculine discourses and practices.

Finally, while identity is a central focus of all three of these waves, none of them interrogate it so as to theorize

ways of transforming its mesmeric grip on subjects and release them (us)6 from the oppression of identity politics.

5 | INTERROGATING IDENTITY

One particular value of performativity theory is that it escapes from the essentialism underlying a ‘metaphysics of

substance’, where the self is seen as a coherent entity that acts independently of the social relations through which

it is formed, sustained and transformed. In modern western societies, and increasingly beyond them, this notion of

the self being substantial is commonplace and one result is that identity is often an overwhelming preoccupation.

However, despite a rejection of the metaphysics of substance, theory does not often interrogate how the preoccu-

pation with identity is foundational to performativity. For, the attachment to, and concern with securing, identity

stimulates subjects to be productively performative. Indeed, this fixation on rendering the self, stable and secure

can be seen as significant to its cathexis drive to achieve competent performances and, as has been argued, partic-

ularly intense around masculine discourses and practices. All identities can be seen as driven by the pursuit of com-

petent performances as the vehicle for gaining social recognition and as the means of attaining some stability and

security for the self. However, the demand for order and control seems even more forceful for those seeking to

secure their masculine identities and it has been argued that this ‘avoidance of impermanence’ and ‘the tendency

to conform, to normalize, to secure and control’ is the pathway to a destructive technocratic ‘nihilism’ (Levin,

1985, p. 74). Yet ‘transfixed by cognitively, masculine disembodied rationality, [this nihilism] goes comparatively

unchallenged in modern society’ (Knights & Clarke, 2017, p. 340). It is nihilistic in so far as it reflects and reproduces

the self‐defeating myths that fail to see how, regardless of the performance, securing the self through identity is

impossible because it is dependent on others’ evaluations and judgements that are by definition fragile, precarious

and unpredictable. However, this does not deter masculine discourses and practices from embracing the pursuit of

‘control, conquest, competitive success’ and self‐mastery through a ‘compulsive preoccupation’ with an identity that

always remains beyond reach (Knights & Kerfoot, 2004, p. 439).

For some men, the feminine ‘other’ is seen as a source of mystery and unknowability, and for that reason rather

troublesome (Butler, 1990), not least in so far as it intensifies the world as precarious, uncertain and uncontrollable, thus

exposing the masculine subject's autonomy and self‐mastery as illusory. Yet autonomy remains central to ideas of mas-

culinity, especially where this is reinforced by liberal Enlightenment beliefs that cultivate humanistic ideologies of indi-

vidualism and human potential (Costea, Amiridis, & Crump, 2012). Moreover, this threat to autonomy reflects and

reinforces an attachment to masculine identities that makes even more performative, if self‐defeating, demands upon

subjects to conform to strategies involving self‐discipline as a means of securing meaning and reality (Knights & Clarke,

2017). Fears of the loss of autonomy are often displaced on to other ‘objects’ in the world and, in particular, machines,

hierarchical subordinates, women and animals that it would appear can be dominated and made controllable. However,

precariousness leads to the masculine body becoming self‐estranged in its all‐encompassing desire for conquest in

response to threats that are as much self‐induced as produced by others. In this sense, the drive to dominate the other

reflects a fear of both internal and external contingencies, which threaten masculine autonomy (Frank, 1990).

Interestingly, feminists have for some time questioned autonomy and the Enlightenment philosophy to which it

owes its allegiance (Jagger, 1983), even to the point of rejecting it as a masculine concept premised on a mind–body,

intellect‐affect, will‐nature dualism (Fraser, 1996).7 They have also criticized the Enlightenment more generally as

reflecting dualistic epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies, which treat femininity as the emotional ‘other’,

KNIGHTS 25

contrasted with the cognitively rational masculinity that is in control of both the social and the natural world

(Braidotti, 1991).

It is not difficult to see this as part of a masculine preoccupation with securing the self through constructing an

orderly and unfragmented world — a process that involves us seeing the world in our own image (Clough, 1992;

Game, 1991). By providing ‘grand’ exhaustive accounts of reality, we fulfil this desire for order while simultaneously

sustaining the security of our identities. The humanistic belief in the pre‐eminence of autonomy and rationality is

seen by posthumanist feminists as the foundation of this masculine preoccupation with order and control (Braidotti,

2011, 2013; Hekman, 1999).

However, some feminists did resist a rejection of humanism and the Enlightenment on the grounds that it erad-

icates the very ‘object’ (i.e., women), the emancipation of which is the feminist project (Benhabib, 1992). While

endorsing poststructuralist critiques of the Enlightenment belief in an ‘episteme of representation’, Benhabib refuses

to deny a space for an active subject as the agent and recipient of feminist demands for emancipation. For, she

argues, this would undermine the reason for, and the content of, a feminist politics. Her solution is to resurrect

the autonomous Subject from the postmodern grave in which it has been exhumed by Foucault and pro‐Foucauldian

feminists (e.g., Hekman, 1999).

Briefly summarizing the debate between feminists who were against and those that supported Foucault (Hekman,

1996; Knights, 2000; Knights & Kerfoot, 2004), the former were critical of his anti‐humanist denial of a normative

and/or agential base from which feminists are able to struggle for women's emancipation (Benhabib, 1992; Hartsock,

1990, 1996). Others focused their critique on Foucault's refusal to give attention to gender as well as sexuality

resulting in his insensitivity to masculine domination and feminist struggles against it (Bartky, 1988; Braidotti, 1991;

Moi, 1985). In a more nuanced critique, Fraser (1996) argues that some resort to humanism is necessary if we are

to resist the discipline targeted upon our bodies and souls (Foucault, 1977). Foucault's treatment of the body as pas-

sive and docile has also been criticized by Bartky (1988) who sees this as gendered in so far as it reflects the masculine

exploitation of women as mere accessories for men and McNay (1992) argues that this neglect of gender differenti-

ation silences women, thus leaving feminist resistance with little agency. Nonetheless, neither are unsympathetic to

his relevance for feminism since McNay (1992) recognizes how the operation of power relations through the body

can be drawn upon to show how gender inequality is constructed out of ‘anatomical difference’ (p. 46). Bartky also

sees the later Foucault as overcoming the limits of passivity when he argues that we have to refuse the subjectivity

that we have become through the ‘kind of political “double bind”, which is the simultaneous individualization and

totalization of modern power structures’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 216 quoted in Knights, 2002, p. 175).

Supporters of Foucault argue that in retrieving an autonomous subject and subscribing a politics of emancipation,

critics simply reproduce the gender binary that is fundamental to the development of dominant heterosexual

masculinities — the master narrative and principal target of feminist critique. They simply sustain the Cartesian dual-

ism between mind and body that perpetuates the privileging of cognition, ‘blind[ing] us to the power of normalisation’

to prevent women engaging in ‘self‐transformative practices’ (McWhorter, 1999, p. 210). It is precisely this self‐trans-

formation that is important for the feminist project and is facilitated by Foucault's validation of subjugated knowledge

as a means of disrupting prevailing power relations (Hekman, 1999). In addition, Foucault's analysis disrupts taken for

granted understandings of sexuality in ways that are entirely consistent with the feminist project (Sawacki, 1991).

There is also good reason why Foucault neglects gender because his analysis is implicitly gendered in so far as sex-

uality is seen as predominantly a male attribute (De Lauretis, 1987) and the discourse is dominantly heterosexual and

thus constructed through, and in ways that reproduce, the gender binary (McCallum, 1996). Moreover, as binary

oppositions are inescapably hierarchical — elevating, for example, men over women, masculinity over femininity, as

well as heterosexual over homosexual, mind over body and rationality over emotion (Irigaray, 1980), disrupting them

has to be a necessary part of any feminist political struggle. Since gender analysis has sometimes been a condition

and consequence of a dominant heterosexuality and homosociality, it is something that you would not expect a

homosexual such as Foucault to support. But, to some extent, this is making excuses for him as part of the reason

for his neglect of gender could well be an opposition to phenomenology such that he did not interrogate identity

26 KNIGHTS

to realize that our attachment to order and stability might be an obstacle for us in refusing what we have become

(Foucault, 1982, p. 216; Knights, 1990, p. 329).

Whether or not we take sides in this debate or simply seek to learn from thinking differently, we can agree with

Foucault ‘that discourses of heterosexuality keep in place the binary differences8 that help to sustain the dominance

of masculinity’, yet we do need to interrogate masculine identities if we are to disrupt them (Knights & Kerfoot, 2004,

p. 443). But this interrogation need not necessarily reflect and reinforce dominant heterosexualities or gender bina-

ries (Knights, 2015). In response to the kind of masculine domination that ‘others’ the feminine, feminists (e.g., de

Beauvoir, 1972) have suggested two strategies — the first simply seeks to eradicate the differences between men

and women, and the second to do the opposite by emphasizing the differences and displacing men by women in

the hierarchy.9 While de Beauvoir favoured the first strategy, Hekman (1999, p. 92) challenges both on the basis that

they remain locked into an Enlightenment epistemology that sustains a belief that there is one single standard of

truth from which deviations are inferior. The first sees women becoming an equal member whereas the second seeks

a rebellion in which women displace men as the guardians of the truth. Both, however, leave unchallenged the unitary

standard of truth that sustains rational instrumental, disembodied and identity‐seeking masculine identities. This

posthuman challenge to unitary standards of truth is just as important as the rejection of notions of the autonomous

subject since both reflect and reproduce masculine identities that thrive on ambition, greed, prejudice, discrimination,

political manipulation, social inequality, animal cruelty and environmental destruction.

It is worth noting here, however, that posthumanists are not anti‐humanist in the sense of rejecting the treatment of

one another humanely (Braidotti, 2013) or of denying the importance of an appeal to human rights in resisting domina-

tion (Foucault, 2004). Emphasizing this ambivalence, Foucault (1997) argued that we must free ourselves from the intel-

lectual blackmail of ‘being for or against the Enlightenment’, although equally we should avoid confusing or conflating ‘the

theme of humanism with the Enlightenment’ (p. 314; original emphasis). However, posthumanists are opposed to essen-

tialist reasoning or Enlightenment conceptions of the autonomous subject and therefore agree with Foucault (2004)

when he argues that ‘the individual is one of power's first effects’ even though power is then relayed within society

through precisely the subjectivity ‘it has constituted’ (Golder (2015), p. 30).10 In this sense, for Foucault, ‘subjects and

power relations are imbricated and co‐constitutive’ (Golder, 2015, p. 8) and therefore are historically forever in transi-

tion, and not a reflection of some essential human nature or obdurate social structure.

6 | CONCLUSION

In contemporary social, economic and political life, masculine discourses and practices, and even their openly macho

celebration, have come to dominate organizations and institutions and despite, or maybe because of, the impact of

the feminist movement, a reactionary backlash has now seemingly surfaced. In the United States, this was vividly

reflected in the 2016 US Presidential election where 53 per cent of white women voted for Trump.11 While class,

race and education were perhaps more instrumental than gender in accounting for this voting behaviour, it does also

suggest that feminists cannot presume homogeneity among women in support of their cause. But perhaps it also

demonstrates that masculine culture has not been disrupted much by feminist progress and that it has been given

a new lease of life by the global shift in the political spectrum toward the extreme right. One way to disrupt masculine

discourses and practices is to see them as a condition and consequence of a preoccupation with securing the self and

identity through perpetrating attempts to control that which is ‘other’. Consequently, an interrogation of identity is a

necessary complement to investigations of power relations and for any critical analysis that claims to contribute to

the transformation of social relations as a means of undermining not only gender, but all other social inequalities. This

is not then about rejecting identity, since this is almost as significant for humans as the air we breathe, but it may

mean challenging its power to possess us in ways that have potentially atrocious consequences — from mental illness

and suicide to hate crimes against those who are stereotyped as different from oneself and one's in‐group.

KNIGHTS 27

The question that always needs to be asked is why are we so attached to our identities? Now, apart from what

has already been argued regarding the belief that identity is the passport to order, security and stability, there is also

the humanistic mantra that drives individuals to strive to fulfil their (our) potential, as part of what it is to be a self‐

respecting human in contemporary society. Consequently, it is a concern for order, security and stability combined

with the force of normative demands to realize some essentialist potential that leads us to be attached to a present

and/or future identity. While such pursuits are unrealizable and thereby self‐defeating, they reflect taken for granted

assumptions about identity within intensified demands to perform that are difficult to detect let alone resist. How-

ever, an aspect of posthumanist feminism calls for a rejection of identity politics through a celebration of difference

and embodied, ethical engagement with the other (Pullen & Rhodes, 2010, 2014). Such a refusal to be preoccupied

with identity so as to render the self ‘open’, both in mind and body to alterity, is wholly in the spirit of intellectual and

scholarly endeavour where alternative ideas and ways of being in the world should be more important than seeking

fame and fortune in celebrity. Since masculine regimes either intentionally or unintentionally promote the latter, we

need to find new ways of resisting them whilst preserving the values of community as an embodied, communal and

ethical way of life. If this limited resistance can be mobilized in the direction of building embodied, ethically engaged

communities as articulated by posthumanist feminists, future generations might see current masculine preoccupa-

tions as merely a historical blip on the landscape.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author acknowledges the helpful comments of Alison Pullen in developing this article.

DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS

The author declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this

article.

ENDNOTES 1 NOTESWriting about nostalgia, Gabriel (1993) claims that, although initially it meant an intense homesickness, it cur- rently is primarily a feeling of love for a past to which one cannot return. I am not really using the term in these senses but rather just to record how the journal evolved.

2 In constructing this brief review and in some of my other analyses, I draw extensively on Edwards’ (2006) extremely eru- dite review of the masculinity literature.

3 Despite this they often did remain supreme in exercising household power.

4 Performativity, of course, operates across and within the genders to establish one or other identity preference. See https://my.vanderbilt.edu/criticaltheoryfall13/2013/11/judith‐butler‐on‐gender‐as‐performed‐or‐performative/ (accessed 29 September 2018).

5 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine‐25943326 6 I readily switch from the impersonal to the personal pronoun throughout this article since, as academics we ourselves are as much the subject matter as are the participants in our empirical research.

7 This section draws on but seeks to develop Knights (2000).

8 Or should we say ‘differance’ (Derrida) in the sense that the difference between the genders is also one in which there is both deference of women to men and a continuous deferral of confronting the relationship for fear of undermining the power on which it rests.

9 Interestingly, in empirical research among academics and veterinary surgeons, we have found resignation to be the most dominant strategy although emulating men or dismantling gender difference did occur (Clarke & Knights, 2018b; Knights & Clarke, 2018).

10 For a detailed analysis of Foucault's ambivalence towards human rights in the sense of both critiquing its humanist pro- motion of the autonomous subject while subversively making them serve the interests of critique, see Golder (2015).

11 https://www.theguardian.com/us‐news/2016/nov/10/white‐women‐donald‐trump‐victory (accessed 17 November 2018).

28 KNIGHTS

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

David Knights is Professor in the Department of Organization, Work and Technology at the Lancaster University

Management School, UK. His recent empirical research has been on academics and veterinary surgeons and his

theoretical interests are in the field of the body and ethics, gender and masculinities, identity and power, and

management and leadership. His most recent publication is Clarke, C. and Knights, D. (2018) ‘Who's a Good

Boy Then? Anthropocentric Masculinities in Veterinary Practice’, Gender, Work and Organization, doi:10.1111/

gwao.12244. He was a co‐founder and co‐editor of Gender, Work and Organization from 1994 to 2016.

How to cite this article: Knights D. Gender still at work: Interrogating identity in discourses and practices of

masculinity. Gender Work Organ. 2019;26:18–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12338