Empowering “Professional” Relationships

This article revisits the relationship between feminist and bureaucratic organization. Much feminist critique has denounced bureaucratic impersonality and proposed the reunion of professional and personal. Yet, little is known of what happens when actual organization members merge “private” matters with “public” life. This article turns to feminist practice as a way to enhance feminist organization theory and, thus, to enrich organizational communication studies with pragmatic alternatives to gendered organization. The author reports an ethnographic study of one feminist organization’s efforts to personalize work relations, which ironically reproduced the division of public and private. The case challenges feminist assumptions about the role of emotionality and sexuality in empowering “professional” relationships and extends an alternative, provisional form of theorizing about feminist practice.