Communication & Theatre 4/514 Issues in Organizational Communication Feminist Critique

Communication & Theatre 4/514

Issues in Organizational

Communication

Feminist Critique

Major principles of feminism:

• Equality

Respect in relationship

$$

Childcare

House work

Education

• Community

Where is community located?

• Cooperation

Relationship

Problem-solving

Life management

Family

• Caring

•End Exploitation

At work

Sexually

Socially

Mumby:

•We need to engage in a postmodern, willful misreading of reality

•We need to think generatively

•Negative dialectic = refusing to resolve difference

•I want to problematize the gap between symbol and reality

•Stories are ideological

•Narratives are full of tension

•The rational and emotional are mutually constitutive

•We need to unfix commonly held opinions

Silence is no longer an option concerning gender, class and race

•Always be prepared for your goals to change

Interpret: Freedom is choosing the products that will produce us.

decipher: We falsely assume our subjectivities when they actually are handed to us off the rack.

What is a

“self-in-relationship”?

This clownfish and sea anemone live together in a symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationship. The clownfish cleans the anemone of algae, and the anemone protects the fish from predators with its nematocysts (stinging cells), to which the anemone is immune. (photo: Kip Evans)

Another slant on consent:

the ways in which disadvantaged stakeholders participate in the reproduction of their disadvantage.

We have to be adequate to the thing to be known.

When we buy, we participate in our own subjugation

To the extent we consent to systems of control we also accept

subjugation.

Power is the ability to influence.

It is visible in preference.

Domination is the systematic and arbitrary suppressing of alternatives to preference.

By questioning the operant representational practices we can gain insight as to the nature of the organization.

The individual is an abstraction from a set of motives within complex competing social systems.

Social structure has no force except as enacted and reproduced in ongoing interactions

Experience is always political

Communication relationships are either open and productive (free or anarchistic) or closed and reproductive (secure or determined).

Emotional labor is difficult to value . . . .

. . . . and is often underpriced.

Do we live in a culture?

or, do we live in an ideology . . .

or, is it really that we live in a particular disciplinary practice?

What is “uncritical traditionalism?”

What does it mean to state that we need to “sustain tensions between Binary Opposites?

Why should we maintain this tension?

To recover the conflict we should have had.

davidlesterart.blogspot.com/

Some binary opposites include:

• Sameness/difference

• Inclusion/exclusion

How are we to resist?

• Plan to leave

• Appearance of compliance

• Appearance

• Indirect challenge

• Direct challenge

What is participatory discourse?

What some alternative ways of organizing?

End of Feminist Critique Session