Abstract
Scholars in sexuality and organization studies have highlighted the centrality of sexuality in organizational power and the ways in which sexuality is in/visibilized, controlled, violently exercised, normativized, and/or resisted in organizations. However, there is still little empirical research focusing on social-movement organizations that promote political change in transgender sexual cultures. With this article, I contribute a qualitative case study of a trans and non-binary do-it-yourself (DIY) sex-toy workshop. Drawing on organization, social-movement, and transgender studies, I develop the notion of ‘trans-organizing’ as a specific mode of organizing and ask: How does trans-organizing around sexuality displace the gender binary in the context of a DIY sex-toy workshop? My findings hint at three dis/organizing processes: dis/organizing language, embodiment, and knowledge sharing.
Highlights
The sex-toy industry includes both ‘business as usual’ and proto-feminist businesses (Comella, 2017; Tyler, 2011), both of which reveal sex toys’ complex production, resistance, and co-optation processes in a for-profit context
The trans-led workshop on DIY sex toys is illustrative of trans-organizing around sexuality for three reasons: 1) The workshop is not unique; it is embedded in a genealogy of anti-capitalist, feminist, and queer ateliers—including sex-toy workshops—that have centred sex, sexuality, and the body in their political reflection on cis-hetero-patriarchal norms, and reclaimed technologies of sex as a political tool for community building and collective action (Borghi, 2013; Preciado, 2018)
In my introduction I defined trans-organizing as a set of dis/organizing processes that materialize through the contingent and continuous practice of problematizing the gender binary, and dis-orienting and re-orienting organizational discourses and practices around an alternative onto-epistemology
Summary
The sex-toy industry includes both ‘business as usual’ and proto-feminist businesses (Comella, 2017; Tyler, 2011), both of which reveal sex toys’ complex production, resistance, and co-optation processes in a for-profit context. Studies of the sex-toy business focusing on the experiences of women, at in-home sex parties, have shown the degrees of resistance that these environments enable. The authors recognize that sex, sexuality, and the body are implicated in commodification processes, as our social needs depend more and more on the market for satisfaction (Tyler, 2004). From this perspective, sex toys are commodities whose accessibility primarily depends on businesses and the market. Any empowerment provided within such a capitalized environment might be inscribed in an individualistic consumption model, rather than in the collective critique of traditional/normative discourses of sex, sexuality, and gender so cherished by the women in the McCaughey and French’s (2001) study
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