Queer Organising and Performativity: Towards a Norm-critical Conceptualisation of Organisational Intersectionality

This paper addresses recent debates of critical performativity and queer theory in critical management studies to develop new, norm-critical methods for critical diversity management. It does so by reading across these debates and, in particular, engaging with the concept of intersectionality. This concept dislocates attention from one diversity category to multiple categories, and how they, by their intersections, produce specific identities and power relations. Building on this, and through empirical observations of norm-critical workshop facilitation in two case organisations, the paper develops a normcritical method for visualising intersecting diversity categories while, at the same time, transgressing them in order to acknowledge difference without having it fixed as such – presented as ephemeral moments of intersectionality. In addition to illustrating how a reflexive approach to underlying structures of norms in (an) organisation can also render visible unmarked categories of power and privilege, the author discusses possible implications of the suggested norm-critical method of intervention for research and practices of diversity management, with emphasis on the kind of critique that is performed.