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Weick, K.E. 2001, Making Sense of the Organization, Oxford: Blackwell. 179 14. Feminist psychosocial approaches to relationality, recognition and denial Shona Hunter INTRODUCTION [George] There are times when I’ve had to rel ect on those sort of categorisa- tions [gender and ethnicity], in a way, um, yes, um I have to think about it, um, in my, working relationships, urm, in terms of ur, you know, maybe a female colleague, and I can’t necessarily that clearly pin down, [whispering] its kind of, it is a theme, that, that runs through and surfaces, at times with dif erent people. I mean, sometimes with some people it’s much more acute, for some reason, than with other people. With other people I scarcely notice, that we’re a dif erent gender, but, with some people there are things that somehow, bring us back to the forefront, time and again. [Shona] Can you think about an example? [George] Yes, I can. Urm, but, but often it’ll be, the reasons for that, will remain concealed, um, and I may at various points speculate as to WHAT IT IS, um, but, unless a person chooses to sort of SHARE what might be very inti- mate stuf , you know, I’ll never actually know, what it is, that makes the gender thing, a live thing between us, you know? [long pause] Um, I can think of one, maybe two relationships like that, where I know it IS AN issue, but I can’t quite often put my i nger on what it is, because it’s locked, like, I don’t know, I can’t really say, dei ne what it is. Um, I know I’m very much BEING DEFINED, in my sort of maleness, you know? Ur, and I have quite a strong sense of that. George, 52, white, male, UK, social work manager 1 In the UK context and internationally there is increasing societal and government recognition as to the existence of a number of social inequali- ties structured around intersecting sets of social relations DTI, 2002, 2004; Yuval-Davies, 2006; Moon, 2007. Such intersectional analysis has been developed and debated in feminist contexts for some time see Hill Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1993. My own perspective on this is similar to Brah and Phoenix 2004: 76 who: Regard the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable ef ects which ensue when multiple axes of dif erentiation 180 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically specii c contexts. The concept emphasizes that dif erent dimensions of social life cannot be separated out into discrete and pure strands. This sort of approach unpacks the limiting normalisations constituted in and through complex, contradictory and conl icting articulations of gender, ‘race’, class, age, sexuality and physical ability. For example feminist-postcolonial scholars are beginning to explore how gender, eth- nicity and sexuality intersect in specii c ways to produce current imperial- isms in the context of the events of September 11, 2001 in New York and subsequent second war in Iraq. Claudia Brunner’s controversial 2007a, 2007b work on the social construction of the ‘[woman] suicide bomber’ traces how raceethnicity, gender and sexuality work together to frame the acts of women suicide bombers as either ‘outcomes of patriarchal oppres- sion, personal despair and exaggerated emotionality – or the women are over sexualised, vilii ed and turned into perverted monsters’ Brunner, 2007b: 8. Whether viewed as ‘mythic brides or monsters’, discursive con- structions of these acts avoid ‘uncomfortable questions of subjectivity, agency and aggression’ Naaman, 2007: 946. In an English context, scholars explore how these same geopolitical events impact on national and local contexts. Claire Alexander’s work 2004, 2007 interrogates the construction of ‘the Asian Gang’ as a con- temporary emblem for social disorder and breakdown in ‘community cohesion’ Home Oi ce, 2001 which is then used to justify punitive forms of public and social policy intervention around young Asian men. She follows how popular and policy discourses of anachronistic, hyper- masculine AsianMuslim 2 cultures serve to produce images of Asian Muslim youth in crisis, caught between cosmopolitan forward-looking Englishness and backward-looking, anachronistic Asianness. From a dif- ferent but complementary perspective, Gail Lewis 2005 also considers the intersections of gender, generation sexuality and ethnicity. Her focus is on the i gure of ‘the immigrant woman’ constructed as symbolic of the limits to multiculturalism and cohesion through her assumed role as care- taker of the sorts of gendered and generational economies which restrict cohesion and produce cultural crisis. My own work focuses on the ways in which these various intersecting discourses play out in particular organisational contexts. In particular, how gender and race are constituted through class, sexuality and gen- eration to produce certain ways of being ‘a public sector professional’ in health, social care Hunter, 2005a, 2005b and educational contexts Hunter, 2006. I trace the ways in which much broader geopolitical discourses play out in notions of ‘the new professionalism’ as this gets Feminist psychosocial approaches: relationality, recognition and denial 181 pitted against ‘the old professionalism’. Two key themes are conspicuous in their recurrence: First, changing gender relations constituted by and constituting moves from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ professionalism provide the terrain on which new forms of racialisation get played out. Second, poor performance including the occurrence of ongoing gender inequalities in service provision and working relations becomes racialised in particular ways. In health and social care, for example, it becomes discursively linked with certain constructions of older Asian masculinities Hunter, under consideration. Policy responses to institutionalised and intersecting discriminations and inequalities continue to meet with varied success. The UK, taking its cue from an EU context, has been dominated by commitments to equali- ties mainstreaming, through tools such as gender impact statements, race equality statements, and various public duties Fredman and Spencer, 2006. The ethos and practice of such approaches have been variously critiqued for conservatism, diluting the specii cities of oppression, priori- tising the economic over the social and technical process over action and outcome Rees, 1998; Booth and Bennett, 2002; Daly, 2005; Squires, 2005, 2006; Walby, 2005; Ahmed et al., 2006; Bowes, 2006; Yuval-Davies, 2006; Jordan and Johns, 2007; Lindsay et al., 2007. A further and less often considered problem with equalities policies is the ongoing failure to acknowledge the ambiguous relationship between institutional and individual racism and sexism within organisations. In the UK context, charges of the ‘unwitting’ Home Oi ce, 1999 or unconscious reproduction of racist and sexist institutional norms within a range of organisational contexts heighten anxiety and confusion around issues of gender and ethnicity. Professionals working within such contexts, like George in the excerpt which opens this chapter, experience ‘a recurrent, and disconcertingly unpredictable, encounter with self’ where values, behaviour and professional practice are rendered visible and problematic Husband, 1996, p. 46. It is this ‘encounter with self’, the ‘felt dimension’ Gunaratnam and Lewis, 2001: 133 of organisa- tional moves to mainstream equality and diversity, that I explore in my research. Working at the intersection of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’; I am interested in if, and how public sector professionals ‘recognize themselves in the politics of ered in their name’ Hollway and Jef erson, 1996: 390. [How] do they recognise and reconcile potentially conl ict- ing social and professional identii cations? And [how] do these negotia- tions contribute to constructing, reconstituting or resisting institutional racism and sexism? How is it that we can simultaneously recognise and deny the existence of social inequalities? In short, I am interested in ‘the recognition denial paradox’. 182 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work RELATIONALITY THROUGH A FEMINIST PSYCHOSOCIAL LENS I call my approach to theorising and unpacking these paradoxical rela- tions, ‘feminist psychosocial’. By ‘psychosocial’ I am referring to a growing and varied body of interdisciplinary work which seeks to integrate the sociological and the psychological. Its proponents tend to embrace criti- cal psychologypsychoanalysis and critical social theory. Notwithstanding the variation in this tradition, I have been critical of the way in which psychosocial theorising can underplay an analysis of gendered and racial- ised social relations, particularly where it considers the perspectives of those in positions of institutional power Hunter, 2005a, 2005b. Thus my own approach is rooted in Kleinien object relations Klein, 1975, 1997; Mitchell, 1986, theorising non-unitary, relational subjectivity and the importance of a dynamic unconscious. But, it also draws on a number of complementary traditions 3 to understand the social politics of ‘race’ and gender as these operate within institutions, and the interrelationship between ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ manifestations of raced and gendered social relations see Simpson and Lewis, 2005. Thus, I use the term ‘feminist’ to situate the way I came to be doing critical and politicised academic work rather than to bound my project as concerned only with gender relations or feminist theorising. Dif erent strands of theory enable dif erent aspects to an analysis. Critical ‘race’ theory Higginbotham, 1992; Frankenberg, 1993; Mama, 1995; Mirza, 1997; Ahmed, 2004 identii es how a variety of social rela- tions and in particular raced social relations constitute the ‘structur- ing absences’ Skeggs, 1997 of social life. Feminist theory Gilligan, 1982, 1993; Gilligan et al. 1990, 1998; Haraway, 1991, 1997; Brown and Gilligan, 1992; Kitzinger and Gilligan, 1994; 4 Butler, 1997; hooks, 2000 highlights how individuals constitute embodied emotional subjects situated in multiple intersecting histories. Psychosocial theory Henriques et al., 1984; Hollway and Jef erson, 1996; Brown, 2000; Hoggett, 2000; Hollway, 2000, 2006; Clarke, 2006; Rosenail, 2006 develops complex conceptualisations of motivation and agency as cognitive and emotional, predicated on the dynamic tension between love and hate for the self and others. Using these dif erent ways of understanding the world together enables me to develop a layered analysis of the social which insists on complex interrelationships between the individual and collective. This means rec- ognising that the ‘I’ and the ‘we’, while related, can never be collapsed one into the other. The most developed attempt at such an integrated analysis in my own i eld of social policy is the work of the ESRC Research Group Feminist psychosocial approaches: relationality, recognition and denial 183 on Care Values and the Future of Welfare CAVA 5 who work with a three-part ontological individual, categorical collective and relational framework Williams, 2000, see also 1999. My feminist psychosocial approach builds on this Hunter, 2003, 2005b. It works with an expanded notion of the relational, what Craib 1989 calls the ‘third level of analy- sis’ between structure and agency, where social categories are negotiated through individual biographies, which are constituted through social rela- tionships, and vice versa. This notion of the relational thus encompasses the biographical, situational, socialcultural and structuralinstitutional in the same frame. As such, the relational constitutes the point at which dis- course meets experience and the cognitive and the af ective are negotiated. It thus enables me to do the sort of intersectional work advocated by Brah and Phoenix 2004, connecting multiple dimensions of the social along multiple axes of dif erentiation. At the categorical level, this feminist psychosocial perspective acknowl- edges that gendered and racialised social relations often remain ‘hidden’ within the everyday politics and practice of organisations’ ‘structuring absences’, in Skeggs’s 1997 terms. This ‘hidden’ nature is part of their power and provides part of the explanation as to why relations of inequal- ity are reproduced even in contexts where inequalities are denounced. The work of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is worth citing at length on this. She sees ‘race’ as a ‘metalanguage’ or ‘global sign’ since: It speaks about and lends meaning to a host of terms and expressions, to a myriad aspects of life that would otherwise fall outside of the referential domain of race. By continually expressing overt and covert analogic relationships, race impregnates the simplest meanings we take for granted. It makes hair ‘good’ or ‘bad’, speech patterns ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. It is, in fact, the overdeterminacy of race in Western culture . . . that has permitted it to function as a meta- language in its discursive representation and construction of social relations . . . whether race is textually omitted or textually privileged, its totalizing ef ect in obscuring class and gender remains. Higginbotham, 1992: 255 What Higginbotham’s work demonstrates is the ways in which even when we do not directly talk about ‘race’, certain racialised meanings become attached to certain words and ways of being. These words then operate as euphemisms for ‘race’; common examples here are the notions of ‘culture’ or ‘community’ see Hunter, 2006 for how this works in rela- tion to education; Lewis, 2000 for social work; Worley, 2005 for commu- nity work. It is these subtleties which make the operation of ‘race’ dii cult to unpick. Higginbotham’s notion of metalanguage also encompasses the points at which ‘race’ becomes hypervisible. Nirmal Puwar’s 2004 work with the UK Civil Service and in academia highlights a similar paradox 184 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work with gender and ethnicity where certain people – Black, women and minoritised subjects – become dei ned only in terms of their raced or gen- dered positioning, eclipsing other modes of identii cation. Just as there are collective ways of thinking about social relations, there are also collective ways of feeling, ‘collective sentiments’ Hoggett and Miller, 2000 which get attached to ‘race’, gender and other social rela- tions. They are constructed through social relationships and get passed round organisations, permeating the everyday relations of the group. These collective sentiments are important to exploring how and why individuals and collectives become invested in and attached to particular ways of thinking and acting Ahmed, 2004. They produce one part of the explanation as to what facilitates and blocks action within organisations Hunter, 2005a; under consideration. At the ontological level a feminist psychosocial approach recognises that the social world is both ‘beyond us and before us’ Butler, 2005: 64. Following Donna Haraway, ‘nothing comes without its world. So trying to know those worlds is crucial’ Haraway, 1997: 37. In order to under- stand any given perspective, it is important to understand the context of the person who of ers that perspective. This context is structured through time, space and the ‘elsewhere’ Gunaratnam, 2003 which includes national and transnational contexts. It is also ‘internally’ structured through the interplay between unconscious fantasy and conscious desire. Following Lavinia Gomez: Our inner world is a changing dynamic process, with some more i xed and some more l uid patterns, both conscious and unconscious. These dynamics inl uence how we experience external reality and are also themselves inl uenced by our own experience of external reality. Gomez, 1997: 2 It is these material and symbolic contexts which constitute the hidden structures for our relational encounters. Subjectivity is always in l ux because we constantly revise and reconstitute who we are through these relational encounters. Thus, because we are always in a process of becom- ing through relationships, our social locations are never entirely self- evident or transparent, even to ourselves. Finally, these dif erent theoretical elements together suggest that social change is neither rational nor linear. Neither collective mobilisation nor individual agency follow a simple certain input 5 certain output model. This is not least the case because where meaning is relational it is dialogi- cally constituted and contested Brown, 1998. Thus, we cannot know all elements of a given situation, we have ‘partial vision’ Haraway, 1991. Because our attachments are multiple structured through the conscious and unconscious, there are contradictions between individual desires and Feminist psychosocial approaches: relationality, recognition and denial 185 public commitments. We can be both ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’, responsi- ble and innocent, thus we can sometimes seem to act ‘irrationally’, ‘against ourselves’ see Hunter, 2005a. There is a distinction here from ‘eitheror’ dualistic perspectives on agency where social change involves dramatic transformation. Because subjects are positioned within and against social relations of inequality, they will inevitably engage in constant struggle work and negotiation to achieve certain ‘ends’, whether these be resistance and change or continuity. SPEAKING ABOUT AND SPEAKING THROUGH I turn now to one of the ways a feminist psychosocial perspective enables me to unpick the ‘recognition denial paradox’ I identii ed at the beginning of this chapter. Because this approach understands recognition as struc- tured through the interplay of social interaction and unconscious symbolic interaction, it enables us to see how people are so much more than their public expressions of categorical identii cation. Such an approach can understand the ways in which recognition can be both constraining and enabling. So this is a perspective that refuses to reduce politics to the abso- lutes often enacted in the name of recognition. In my research with welfare professionals working in health and social care I make the distinction between speaking about and speaking through social relations. This distinction enables me to highlight the important tensions and ambivalences produced through the gap between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’. In contrast to other research which i nds its participants reticent to speak about the operation of gender and ethnicity within their working contexts, my i ndings identii ed an increasing tendency for welfare professionals to speak about institutional racism and sexism. This suggests an increased willingness and ability to recognise race and gender as discursively structuring organisational life. Participants talked about a range of issues including unequal employment practices, working hierarchies structured according to gender and ‘race’, and other inequalities in working interactions, decision-making processes and other organisational practices such as ethnic monitoring, all contributing to the verbal, symbolic and practical material reproduction of inequalities. However, as we saw in George’s example at the beginning of this chapter, these welfare professionals continued to have incredible dii culty in positioning themselves within these social relations; positioning the ‘I’ within a gendered and raced ‘we’. So for George, although he has had to rel ect on the ways in which gender and ethnicity structure his working relationships, he ‘can’t clearly pin [it] down’, ‘can’t . . . put my i nger on