Once upon a time…The role of woman’s body in gender narratives

This work proposes the use of Greimas’s actantial model to explore organizational discourses about gender. We are motivated by the strong evidence of a long-lasting narrative scheme, which constrains women to “non-actant” roles, and relegates female bodies to be “opponent” components of a pervasive male narrative. By using this fixed narrative, organizational discourses have perpetuated gender discrimination, leading women to perceiving their corporal selves at odds with their real or essential selves (Trethewey, 1999), to disciplining, controlling, normalizing, hiding, and neutralizing their own bodies (Børve, 2007; Haynes, 2008, 2011; Trethewey, 1999), even to dis-embodying themselves. When applying Greimas’s actantial model, a number of literature texts show some fixed components of the action, called actants. For many years women have been considered as victims of masculine norms in organizational discourses (Lewis, 2014). As victims, they have hardly ever been heroines, in terms of being subjects of narrations. On the contrary, women are often conceived as opposite other of the male and they are “absent in the capacity of subject” (Irigaray, 1985:132). In line with these considerations, they may be associated with non-actant roles of an intrinsically male narrative. According to Irigaray (1985), this lack of subjectivity has prevented women to create narratives, language, embodiment and representations of their own selves. Since bodies are receivers and not creators of social meanings, and they are understood and used through institutional practices and discourses (Butler, 1993), the female body becomes an opponent actant to be objected. In fact, women’ bodies are viewed excessively sexual “as they are revealed through pregnancy, menstruation, emotions and clothing” (Trethewey, 1999:426-445). This way of thinking reveals, on the one hand, that pregnancy and maternity make visible the existence of the body, its sexuality and carnality, as well as the maternal potentialities and the reproductive role of women; on the other hand, that the “abject” maternal body covers all women, also those who are not mothers (Fotaki, 2013; Kristeva, 1982). While non-pregnant bodies are perceived already stood out from the norm of male embodiment (Gatrell, 2010; Hausman, 2004), pregnant ones evoke suspicion, fear, leakage and revulsion (e.g., Longhurst, 2001), and pregnant women are considered less dependable, competent and committed to their jobs, and too much emotional, sympathetic, nurturing, and irrational (Gatrell, 2010). These arguments suggest that the absence of women as subjects in organizational histories and the opponent role of their body are closely related. Interestingly, men’ bodies are not opponent actant, because they are highly consistent with the masculine norms settled by recurring male subjects. In order to define themselves in their own terms, women need to occupy a subject role (Irigaray, 1993). This requires introducing different organizational discourses (Fotaki, 2013), that in our perspective means changing the existing narrative scheme. Such perspective paves the way for challenging inquires aimed at creating new discourses, symbols and representations where women, with their body, take action into the narrative.