Mothering managers: (Re)interpreting older women's organizational subjectivity

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores motherhood as an organizational subjectivity. Highlighting the experience of older women in a global engineering firm, and my own experience as an academic leader, the paper shows how the maternal body is culturally produced and how discourses of motherhood perpetuate highly gendered notions of who can give and receive care in organizations. This paper argues that the patriarchal construction of women as endlessly maternal, but never complete, limits the possibility for gendered agency. The paper calls for a reinterpretation of the maternal in organizations that would allow women to reclaim a feminine space where they can draw on the full repertoire of their embodied potentialities in order to experiment and assert their subjectivity. This reinterpretation of the maternal would also facilitate an uncoupling of notions of care and motherhood which would allow for a degendered reciprocal care offered and received by all members of the organization.