Enchanting the Otherwise: Magical Realism and the Gendered Ontologies of Organizational Becoming

Abstract

This paper enacts a feminist-posthumanist reimagining of gender as ontological disturbance, using magical realism not as metaphor but as epistemological method. Rejecting representational logics and the managerial rationalities of organizational realism, we advance gender not as identity or role but as spectral interference—a transversal flicker that haunts the architectures of bureaucratic life. Drawing on Barad, Braidotti, Haraway, and Glissant, we engage magical realism as an enchanted mode of inquiry that disrupts binary logics, temporal linearity, and epistemic securitization. Through conceptual vignettes and speculative fabulations, we explore affective labor, invisible metrics, haunted infrastructures, and the spectrality of gendered power. Our argument foregrounds ontological mischief as feminist praxis: a refusal of institutional fixity and a commitment to worlding otherwise. In tracing gender's recursive entanglement with race, class, and temporality, we call for a methodologically generative politics of fabulation that unsettles the realism of gendered social order and opens space for speculative reconfigurations of organizational life.