“We all like you […], stay calm”—My journey from an unappreciated and not listened to a promising and supported researcher

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, my purpose is to explore the issue of sexism in businesses and business schools from a subjectivist and experiential perspective. In order to do that, I used autobiographic narratives of events that have happened to me throughout my life as a method of data generation, providing critical accounts of my lived experience, in the light of the theoretical lens by which I address the topic. Considering gender as a performative act that is fundamental to the process of our subjectivation, I argue that being a black queer man results in the impossibility of performing an intelligible gender in the realms of businesses and business schools in three fashions: first, by the impossibility of performing hegemonic (white) masculinity; second, by the impossibility of performing a subordinated tough masculinity; and third, by the prohibition of performing femininity, considering the prevailing misogyny in societies. I suggest that this impossibility of gendering myself and, hence, becoming a subject could be challenged by a coalition with white, cis, heterosexual, and in positions of power, allies, and potential alliances, which connect individual and collective resistance acts.