Gay Male Academics in UK Business and Management Schools: Negotiating Heteronormativities in Everyday Work Life
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12061 |
| Date | 01 July 2014 |
| Published date | 01 July 2014 |
Gay Male Academics in UK Business and
Management Schools: Negotiating
Heteronormativities in Everyday
Work Life
Mustafa Bilgehan Ozturk and Nick Rumens
Middlesex University Business School, The Burroughs, London NW4 4BT, UK
Corresponding author email: Mustafa.bilgehan.ozturk@gmail.com
This paper contributes to a neglected topic area about lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans
people’s employment experiences in UK business and management schools. Drawing on
queer theory to problematize essentialist notions of sexuality, we explore how gay male
academics negotiate and challenge discourses of heteronormativity within different work
contexts. Using in-depth interview data, the paper shows that gay male academics are
continually constrained by heteronormativity in constructing viable subject positions as
‘normal’, often having to reproduce heteronormative values that squeeze opportunities
for generating non-heteronormative ‘queer’ sexualities, identities and selves. Construct-
ing a presence as an openly gay academic can invoke another binary through which
identities are (re)constructed: as either ‘gay’ (a cleaned up version of gay male sexuality
that sustains a heteronormative moral order) or ‘queer’ (cast as radical, disruptive and
sexually promiscuous). Data also reveal how gay men challenge organizational heter-
onormativities through teaching and research activities, producing reverse discourses and
creating alternative knowledge/power regimes, despite institutional barriers and risks of
perpetuating heteronormative binaries and constructs. Study findings call for pedagogi-
cal and research practices that ‘queer’ (rupture, destabilize, disrupt) management knowl-
edge and the heterosexual/homosexual binary, enabling non-heteronormative voices,
perspectives, identities and ways of relating to emerge in queer(er) business and man-
agement schools.
Introduction
In this paper we examine the relationship between
sexuality and heteronormativity in the context of
UK business and management schools, with a
particular focus on how gay male academics nego-
tiate and challenge the heteronormativities
present in organizational life. There are several
reasons why our study is apposite. First, the work
experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans
(LGBT) academics in business and management
schools is barely documented. Yet emergent
research has underscored the salience of sexuality
in and around business and management schools
as a serious topic for study (Ford and Harding,
2008; Fotaki, 2011, 2013; Sinclair, 1995, 2000,
2005), with some commentators noting the neces-
sity of future research on how the heteronorma-
tive dynamics of these institutions are experienced
by LGBT people (Fotaki, 2011). Second, a paral-
lel literature reveals that LGBT academics from
different disciplines experience employment dis-
crimination and persecution on the grounds of
sexual orientation from students and colleagues in
a variety of settings including lecture halls, class-
rooms and corridors, and in organizational
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British Journal of Management, Vol. 25, 503–517 (2014)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12061
© 2014 The Authors. British Journal of Management published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British
Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is
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