Feminist social movements and whistleblowing disclosures: Ireland's Women of Honour

Abstract

Feminist social movements based on workers disclosing sexual harassment and sexual violence have had a dramatic impact on workplaces worldwide. But what are the specific dynamics shaping organizations founded on acts of disclosure? Organizational whistleblowing research has overlooked this topic, while literature on feminist social movements has not, to date, focused on whistleblowing disclosure as a shared experience prompting collective action. In this article I address these lacunae. I isolate disclosure-based feminist movements (DFMs) as a specific, and important, organizational form, and I draw on relevant insights from whistleblowing theory to shed light on the dynamics therein. I find that first, DFMs are founded on a distinct kind of whistleblowing where members speak out about personally-experienced embodied violence. Second, movements are galvanized through affective connections formed through the sharing of such experiences, and third, the perceived credibility of individual disclosures are uniquely enhanced through the salience emerging from collective speaking. Extant whistleblowing theory—and literature on feminist social movements—fails to account for organizations based upon embodied and collective experiences of disclosure. In this article a novel theoretical framing based on feminist theory is developed, emphasizing embodied, affective forms of parrhesia involving collective salience that counters whistleblower reprisal. Ideas are illustrated throughout with insights from an exemplar case within the worldwide military #MeToo movement: Ireland's Women of Honour. Contributions for scholarship on feminist social movements and organizational whistleblowing conclude the article alongside insights for practice.