Our Affirmation of WERK as an organizational praxis is a method of queer embodied listening which ruptures onto-epistemic processes that undergird economics, politics and law

In this article, I offered the development of a methodological approach I term embodied queer listening. The approach was developed based on a need to capture, analyze, and write the researcher’s

embodied experience in(to) an interview-based study, recognizing it as data and establishing it as

a legitimate source of knowledge. The approach is based on anti-narrative research (Riach,

Rumens, and Tyler 2016) and combines embodied listening (Gill 2012) with queer listening (Landreau 2012) with the aim to enable researchers to engage critically with normative narratives

shared in interview situations and make space for listening to their own embodied experiences

that are otherwise ignored and suppressed in normative discourse. As part of this, embodied

queer listening enables a careful reflection and consideration of the researcher’s positionality and

power relation vis-à-vis the research participants in the temporal, spatial, and emotional context of their encounter. Embodied queer listening acknowledges and establishes embodied experience,

particularly from different marginalized positionalities, as data and as a source of knowledge so

that it can guide further conceptualization and theorization.

The article offers three interconnected contributions. First, it provides a method for researching

and writing perspectives in organizations that are deviant from normative discourse, second, it adds

to epistemological discussions on the relation between knowledge production and gendered and

racialized power structures in relation to feminist standpoint epistemologies in organization

studies, and third, it extends our thinking about embodied organizational research and writing

from a norm-critical perspective.

As the empirical example of this study showed, using embodied queer listening as a method for

doing and writing research can be of great importance for research on racism and racist discrimination in organizations, the existence of which often remains ignored, and in-depth investigations,

therefore, remain scarce (Bell et al. 2021; Cole and Grace 2020; Dar et al. 2021; Nkomo 2021). In this

particular case, the use of embodied queer listening made it possible to explore the racism that

permeates workplaces at Danish universities despite the problem of racism rarely being explicitly

acknowledged or put into words by the interviewees. Furthermore, it allowed conceptualizing

racism as unspeakable, that is, not only to reveal that it is not spoken about but to establish an analytically based argument that not speaking of racism – its unspeakability – is part of reproducing it

within the university system. Writing through poetry and stories as part of embodied queer listening

practices allowed integrating the embodied knowledge that derives from this approach, establishing

it as part of knowledge creation. Embodied queer listening can thus provide the groundwork for

important further theorization and conceptualization, taking its basis in perspectives and forms of

expression that are deviant from normative discourse, and marginalized in dominant forms of knowledge production. Next to racism research this is of relevance, for instance, when investigating queer

forms of organizing (Christensen 2021a; Plotnikof et al. 2022; Vitry 2020) which might only become

recognizable when we know how to listen for them.

Establishing embodied queer listening as an approach to doing and writing research in organization studies contributes to epistemological discussions on the relation between knowledge production and gendered and racialized power structures. Speaking to scholars working from marginalized, othered positions, it offers an approach of how it can become possible to center, acknowledge, and analytically utilize our embodied, lived experience when we conduct research as ‘Outsiders Within’ (Collins 1999), attuned to ‘the margin’ and the center (hooks 2000). It might help us to sense, think, feel, and know all at the same time, and demand for the knowledge deriving from our lived experience to be taken seriously – a potentially radical act considering how easily our emotions and embodied experiences are dismissed by calling us ‘angry Black women’ or ‘feminist killjoys’ (Ahmed 2014a; 2017; hooks 2000; Lorde 1984). Addressing the organization studies community more broadly, embodied queer listening challenges us to think more carefully about our own embodied positions of marginalization and privilege vis-à-vis our study participants and how our embodied experience may influence both the study process and analytical insights – important examples of such careful reflection and creative ways of approaching this challenge in organization studies may be found in van Amsterdam and van Eck (2019) and van Eck, van Amsterdam, and van Den Brink (2021). It moreover demands to home in on Black feminist standpoint epistemologies to accept and value embodied experience created ‘at the margin’ as a legitimate source of knowledge that does not need to be tested against a (white, cis, male, Western) dominant norm of acceptable knowledge (Collins 2009; Essed 1991; hooks 2000; Mohanty 2003). This has been called for within organization studies, for instance from feminist and postcolonial perspectives (Alcadipani et al. 2012; Dorion 2021a; 2021b), yet practical approaches and spaces to explore doing and writing research from such epistemological standpoints remain scarce (Bell et al. 2021; Dar et al. 2021). Finally, the theoretical conjunction of anti-narrative research as an approach to exploring and challenging the reproduction of norms and their performative power (Butler 2004; Riach, Rumens, and Tyler 2016), queer listening as a practice of queer orientation (Ahmed 2006; Landreau 2012), and embodied listening as a way to foreground the epistemic value within marginalized, situated, lived experience (Gill 2012; hooks 2000) allows for the approach of embodied queer listening to extend our thinking about embodied research and embodied writing. It contributes a methodological approach for embodied organizational research that aims to work critically with the normativity of dominant narratives shared in research situations (Ashcraft and Muhr 2018; Christensen 2018; 2021b; Holck and Muhr 2017; Riach, Rumens, and Tyler 2016). That is, it combines norm-critical (Christensen 2021b; Guschke and Christensen 2021; Plotnikof et al. 2022) and embodied research approaches (Jääskeläinen and Helin 2021; Mandalaki and Pérezts 2022; Thanem and Knights 2019), extending them into each other by acknowledging the radical, norm-critical potential of embodied research conducted ‘at the margin’ while recognizing embodied, lived experience as an important basis of norm-critique. Embodied writing as part of embodied queer listening thereby becomes a ‘political and ethical mobilization […] to change the terms that we are given – to rupture the epistemic containment that continually oppresses’ (Pullen 2018, 129). Making space for embodied writing in organization studies thus means making space for embodied knowledge created ‘at the margin’, space for an epistemological and political struggle for freedom.