Queering space and organizing with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology

Abstract The intended contribution of this article is to add to the growing body of work “queering” organization studies by exploring how bodies, spaces, and organizing can be “queered.” I draw on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology of 2006 to explore the relationship between bodies and the organization of space, in capitalist as well as alternative modes of organizing. Through the analysis of semi‐structured interviews with the three organizers of a queer feminist group in a British medium‐size city, I explore how we might resist capitalist and other normative spaces by queering them, and how these queered spaces open up fields of action for queerer modes of organizing. In so doing I further the critical project of Queer Theory in Management and Organization Studies to interrogate the norms that give shape to organizational spaces and processes, and the tensions that might arise when refusing their straightening effects.