Suchergebnisse

Data collected from interviews with mothers and one mother-to-be characterized pregnancy as a time during which a woman has little jurisdiction over her body.Some respondents found this loss of control discomfiting and unpleasant, but others told of how much they had enjoyed their pregnancies for the same reason. On this basis, we suggest that pregnancy may represent a specific 'body episode' which belies the modern Western conviction that we have and possess our bodies and are able to mould them accordingly. Second, we propose that its physical transitions provided for some informants a disturbing testament to the fact that our influence over our bodies is in fact incomplete – that they are in many ways obdurate and 'wayward'. Third, we suggest that the more positive descriptions of pregnancy could be attributed to the demands of the 'body project', the efforts that women especially invest in sculpting their bodies in culturally acceptable ways. Pregnancy therefore may represent for some women an opportunity to luxuriate in their materiality, because during this period they are unable to govern their bodies in the ways to which they are accustomed in more mundane physical circumstances.

Abstract
This article aims to offer a consideration of hospitality in organizations, occupations and thresholds to illustrate the sociocultural dimensions of hospitality spaces. Our aim is to open up thinking around spaces of hospitality offered by organizational members, particularly those employees who work with the vulnerable 'other', across thresholds into homes and organizational spaces. Community social workers illustrate the practice of hospitality as they offer advocacy and inclusion for those individuals excluded from the wider community. The move towards professionalism has been argued as one way of establishing value, authority and confidence in the role of the community social worker and the decisions these individuals make in their work. However, critics have indicated that professionalism emphasizes practices of ideological control, norms and exclusion, in effect undermining key social work values, ethos and practice. Our results illustrate that community social workers developed asymmetric relationships of trust within their community and negotiated with other organizational members in order to create spaces for their work and inclusion.

This paper argues that our understandings of ourselves as gendered, as either masculine or feminine, are a power effect of the contemporary discourse of gender difference. The main premise of the paper is that this social construction of gender allows for gender difference to be resisted-and the form of resistance analyzed here is gender-inappropriate dress. Two forms of gender-inappropriate dress-male transvestism and female power dressing-are discussed in the paper and argued to present a particular kind of challenge to our discursively constituted sense of the rigidity and mutual exclusivity of the gender divide. This analysis is used in the conclusion to offer some critical comments regarding the strand of organizational analysis which argues for a "feminization/reeroticization" of the workplace.

It is often suggested that some occupations are inherently more suited to men or to women. Such beliefs can become norms that can have powerful effects on those who inhabit, or wish to enter, such occupations. This article explores the discursive framing of gendered occupations by considering the experience of cis female military firefighter officers in the masculine world of the Corpo de Bombeiros Militar in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo. We identify this Global South organization as extremely gendered but also profoundly colonial in its patriarchal order and its hierarchical culture and structure. We use Kristeva's and Butler's work on abjection to understand how these officers and their bodies are differentiated. Based on interviews and document analysis, we foreground their abjection using three examples: the organization's physical entrance test, the maternal body and its masculine organizational grammar. Yet, just as they are targets of exclusion, these women and their bodies are also necessary to maintain the hypermasculinity of this organization. Our contribution is to analyse abjection in a specific hypergendered organizational context where masculinity is not only amplified by the co-presence of military service and firefighting, but also where gender relations, structure and culture have deep colonial roots.