Gender Identity

Abstract

Identity is an important topic in organization and management scholarship. However, gender identity is often referred to only in passing, while in-depth theoretical engagement with the concept is rare. This is despite heated debates among feminists and polarizing discussions on gender and acceptable gender identities in many countries. Yet, given current conversations on the multiplicity and fuzziness of identities and identifications in work organizations, much can be gained from such engagement. This chapter considers these issues through a poststructuralist and psychoanalytic feminist lens inspired by the work of Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger along with Rosi Braidotti and post-colonial feminists’ ideas, to develop relational identity of gender. Their conceptualization of identity as fluid, malleable, and defined in relation to the other, it is argued, may enrich our understanding of identities in organizations. The notion of gender identity as a provisional and unstable construct that unfolds relationally also has broader ethical and political implications for re-envisioning new modes of cohabitation on an equivalent basis. Such an approach might contribute to forging both a new politics of identity, and practical programmes that address organizational injustice and social inequalities.