This paper orchestrates alterethnographical reflections in which we, women, polyphonically document, celebrate and vocalize the sound of change. This change is represented in Kamala Harris's appointment as the first woman, woman of color, and South Asian American as the US Vice President, breaking new boundaries of political leadership, and harvesting new gains for women in leadership and power more broadly. With feminist awareness and curiosity, we organize and mobilize individual texts into a multivocal paper as a way to write solidarity between women. Recognizing our intersectional differences, and power differentials inherent in our different positions in academic hierarchies, we unite to write about our collective concerns regarding gendered, racialised, classed social relations. Coming together across intersectional differences in a writing community has been a vehicle to speak, relate, share, and voice our feelings and thoughts to document this historic moment and build a momentum to fulfill our hopes for social change. As feminists, we accept our responsibility to make this history written, rather than manipulated or erased, by breaking the mold in the form of multi-layered embodied texts to expand writing and doing research differently through re/writing otherness.
This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some 'dirtiness' that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.
This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some 'dirtiness' that is essential to writing,
This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.
The purpose of this paper is to add to the broader field of feminist organization and entrepreneurship scholarship by introducing and theorizing girlhood as a distinct enterprising femininity. More specifically, we investigate how girlhood, now enjoying a prominent role in commercial culture, impacts the relationship between enterprising self and femininity due to girlhood's many non-entrepreneurial features. We draw on the scholarship from the field of cultural studies to present the core politico-aesthetical categories, used to express girlhood as a distinct form of femininity. Empirically, we present and analyze an illustrative case of two large women-only professional networks that use girlhood and enterprising as their core message to their audiences. Our contributions render visible and provide a theoretical framework for studying girlhood as enterprising femininity, and add to the theorization of gendered and intersectional tensions and struggles between the market pressures to conform to the prevailing ideals of individualized success and the political ambition to challenge the status quo. More so, our theorization of girlhood as enterprising femininity allows us to raise question of what facets of femininity remain excluded - and thus in need of further theorization and critical feminist interventions - within the economic domain.
Systemic violence against women in the military has existed for decades, but they have mostly refrained from public resistance. However, in the context of the #Metoo‐movement in Sweden, 1768 women published a call for an end to violence and sexual harassment in the military. We analyze this call as a public resistance effort against the military and find that #Metoo is: 1) challenging the norms of the hyper‐masculine military organization, making resistance towards it visible, and 2) resisting the practices of sexual harassment and lack of responsibility in the military organization. The military organization is questioned when it comes to norms and practices, but there are variations in whether the social order of the military is truly challenged. Still, the call highlights the fragmentation of this “last bastion of masculinity”. More research is needed on the erosion of the militarized norms and practices and the effects of the call.
This article reports on a research investigation into gender and local government in Mumbai in India and London in England. In both these cities female representation at the political level stands at around one third, achieved in London slowly in recent years and in Mumbai more rapidly through the adoption of a quota, or seat reservation system, implemented in 1992. In considering the experience of the women concerned it is argued that their presence and aspirations have been influenced through the networks of their respective women's movements, operating through civil society and the local state. In considering the ways in which they organize and manage the duties of office and their gendered identities, as well as in their focus on the most disadvantaged in their communities and in their dealings with others, the part played by social movements in influencing change is examined.
The political potential of unconventional and even transgressive forms of writing in management and organization studies has been invigorated in recent years through an explicit connection with feminist theories, ideas, and practices. The results have been a new wave of scholarship that brings together the personal, the political, and the theoretical as a means to intervene in masculine orthodoxy of organizational writing. This intervention seeks to change what and how we understand organizational phenomena, with an ultimate goal of transforming practice toward a more equal and egalitarian future. We introduce five papers that responded to a call to explore the intersections between change and academic writing, as well as an exploration of alternatives to dominant masculine academic writing styles. Such writing, we aver, might facilitate change not just in the academy, but also in organizations and by extension, society.
Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in womens entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing womens entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women entrepreneurial or postfeminist subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Frasers concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for womens collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.
Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly ch7anged the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women 'entrepreneurial' or 'postfeminist' subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.
Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women entrepreneurial' or postfeminist' subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.
Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women 'entrepreneurial' or 'postfeminist' subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.
This article critically explores assumptions underpinning Swedish eldercare policies that introducing market practices in publicly funded eldercare services advances women's entrepreneurship. We argue that gendered privileges and disadvantages are being recreated on tax-funded home care markets; furthermore, gendered inequalities intersect with ethnicity and profession in management of small-scale care companies, dealings with authorities governing home care services and standards for home care work. However, we find that the salience of categories depends on the context in which they emerge. While gender and profession are dominant in management, gender and ethnicity influence interactions with authorities. Only in standards for home care work do all categories simultaneously shape the business approaches of care entrepreneurs. Our analysis, based on data on size and growth of home care companies and interviews with small-scale care entrepreneurs, suggests that regulations and practices privilege big companies and care entrepreneurs who echo the white, masculine gendering of entrepreneurship as 'doing business' and disadvantage small-scale entrepreneurs focusing on leading care work to produce quality care.
Discusses the literature on women & organizational/workplace stress & then considers some of its assumptions, limitations, & silences. It is suggested that not all women share identical intersts & that different forms of resistance formulated by women, from individual action to social support networks, are required to address workplace stress. Contrast is drawn between an approach derived from a politics of identity rooted in feminist theory & the conventional approach of work psychologists characterized by individual/social roles & an androgynous approach initiated from above.
'A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.
A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them? This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.
The aim of this article is to contribute to the exploration of men’s positions in professions numerically dominated by women through an in depth analysis of the gendering practices in groups of social workers. The empirical material consists of interviews with three work groups in Sweden, each with one man and several women as members. The analysis focuses upon gendering practices in the interview setting. It shows how the positions occupied by the men in the sample confirm or undermine constructions of masculinity as dominance. Furthermore, it is argued that to fully understand men’s positions in these groups the analysis needs take other forms of inequality into account in addition to gender. It is shown that in the empirical cases under scrutiny men’s positions are shaped by regimes of inequality where age and gender relations, as well as notions of professional experience, are interconnected.
Neoliberal academia is marked by vertical and horizontal gender segregation, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a particularly concerning case. Women with PhDs are underrepresented, and when they do participate, they are more likely than men to be in teaching-intensive roles. Beyond equality concerns, this is problematic because when women are interpreters rather than producers of disciplinary knowledge, the STEM enterprise remains gender-biased. Using data from a 2-year ethnography with physical science faculty in teaching-intensive roles, this paper argues that gender inequity is reproduced through postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. Participants who are mothers say they are flying under the radar at work. They self-surveille as they engage in both paid labor as university educators and unpaid carework at home. Importantly, when participants challenge hegemonic gender norms, they attract the radar's attention and are sanctioned. This study contributes to a growing understanding of how and why women are marginalized in STEM careers. Women with science PhDs fulfill their university's teaching mission with minimal support for the implied compensation of work-life balance, leaving the institutional structures which privilege men's participation in STEM research intact.
This paper draws from our own experiences of sexism within Business Schools to bring attention to the effects of the operation of a highly masculinized, white, cis-gendered, and patriarchal culture, whether enacted by men or women, and to how we come to be silenced within it. Our work reflects on intersectional issues of race, health (mental and physical), and care-work, using faction built from six paired interviews to tell a truth we feel unable to tell individually. This piece highlights the real fear of repercussions that still persist for female academics, and uses the acts of collecting data and writing differently to offer the authors a safe space in which to resist both overt and structural sexism in Business Schools. It highlights the need to take seriously those subtleties of sexism that we are often expected to put up with, those difficult-to-name aspects of our working lives that leave us feeling it would be "silly" to complain and act as a form of micro-coercive control over our lives. We operationalize our collective voice as a form of activism in the academy that is situated within our individual silences.
Inspired by the alternative ethnographic tradition, the aim of this article is to contribute with an approach to organizational ethnography informed by the radical imperative to encounter and understand the Other in his/her complex otherness and difference. The approach is conceptualized in terms of alterethnography and it is outlined as a way of doing research/writing for change at odds with dominant patriarchal scientific writing orders. Illustrated by a study of creativity, written in the form of an academic postmodern detective novel fiction, alterethnography is envisioned as uncontained and disruptive, unpatriarchal and disconformist: it is an approach that transgresses the boundaries of the ego, striving to embrace otherness as togetherness. © 2020 The Authors. Gender, Work & Organization published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Inspired by the alternative ethnographic tradition, the aim of this article is to contribute with an approach to organizational ethnography informed by the radical imperative to encounter and understand the Other in his/her complex otherness and difference. The approach is conceptualized in terms of alterethnography and it is outlined as a way of doing research/writing for change at odds with dominant patriarchal scientific writing orders. Illustrated by a study of creativity, written in the form of an academic postmodern detective novel fiction, alterethnography is envisioned as uncontained and disruptive, unpatriarchal and disconformist: it is an approach that transgresses the boundaries of the ego, striving to embrace otherness as togetherness.
Sweden is often described as one of the world’s most gender-equal societies, but the gender pay gap nevertheless remains large. In 2007, a special gender-equality fund that targeted women workers was successfully implemented in the collective bargaining agreement. Although it decreased the gender pay gap, it was controversial and has never been employed since. The aim of this article is to increase knowledge concerning the conditions for such âgender-equality bargainingâ through a detailed empirical case study. An in-depth study of the bargaining process casts light on how the institutional features of bargaining have changed after 2007 in a way that significantly restricts further attempts to make relative wage changes in gender-segregated labor markets. The findings indicate that increased employer coordination and a strong industry norm appear to hinder gender-equality initiatives.
This article aims to contribute knowledge on how access to hierarchical networks of communication is constructed through organizational contexts associated with the gendered nature of feminized, caring work and masculinized, technical work, respectively. The article is based on interviews with 43 middle managers. Both men and women in male-dominated technical occupations and female-dominated caring occupations were interviewed. Eight interviews with politicians and strategic managers were also carried out. The results show that middle managers' access to hierarchical networks differs between feminized and masculinized contexts; hierarchical networks between organizational levels are common in male-dominated technical jobs, while such networks are almost non-existent in female-dominated caring occupations. The results illustrate how organizational conditions follow the gender segregation in organizations and the labour market and, further, how these contexts shape men's and women's access to hierarchical networks. The results also illustrate how the patterns of networks create and reproduce inequalities in sex-segregated organizations.
In 2001, Swedish authorities imposed a new obligation upon all firms with ten or more employees to undertake annual wage surveys, ‘workplace equality audits’ in which it is possible to ascertain, remedy and prevent unwarranted wage differentials and other unfair employment terms between men and women. An important implication of the new system, called ‘workplace equality renewal’ (självsanering), is that, at the level of the firm all Swedish employers must explain what they mean by work of ‘equal value’ as opposed to ‘different value’. This article discusses the practical pros and cons of the new system, and considers how the surveys can be used in research into the present state of gendered work division. A main finding is that the introduction of this new legislation in the long run might change the Swedish industrial relations system as well as the preconditions for many companies’ human resource management policies. Yet, neither the governmental agencies involved nor the parties’ confederate organizations have been able to clarify what the issue is really about to the single, small business employer or to the local trade union branches. Many employers find any interference, whatever it may be, threatening and trade unions have not realized the potentialities of the system from an employee perspective, potentialities connected to the fact that companies are now more or less forced to make transparent their wage policies at large.
This article offers a reflection around the question of 'do we need 'gender' any longer?' In taking up this problem and inspired by the way in which postqualitative inquiry has opened a conversation with Deleuzian philosophy and formulated a 'concept as/instead of method' line of thought, I wonder whether new images of thought might give the concept of gender 'the forces it needs to return to life' or the forces to abandon it. I propose four different images that might provoke the desire to experiment with a new image of thought in relation to the problem: a vegetal mode of thought, a musical mode, a fleshy mode as labiaplasty, a nonliving mode. This choice is connected to the dualities they target: the human/vegetal living world, the rational/artistic production of knowledge, the dis-embodied/corporeal being in the world, the life/nonlife hierarchization. Each way of thinking of 'gender' stages, enacts, performs a different material reality of the concept that shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices. Hence, if gender has become a dominant discourse, it may be that positive repetition of this discourse might become a way of opening a new site inside it, by de-territorializing it and re-territorializing it otherwise.
In the last decade the implementation of computerized technology and advanced information systems in public administration has gathered speed. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which these changes might be gendered by analysing different narratives of digitalization and organizational change in public administration. The empirical findings indicate that resistance to information and communication technology is explained away by managers as reflecting women's low computer maturity, while the narratives of the case-workers themselves reflect their resistance to deskilling and simplified work specifications, as well as their experience of a shift in the work object — from working with human beings to working with electronic information. The findings indicate that the increased use of information technology genders resistance to degradation as a feminized fear of technology and low computer maturity.
This article analyses an episode of collective resignation. Carried out mainly by specialist nurses, this is a proliferating form of worker protest in Sweden that poses a challenge to austerity policy and emerges in a specific industrial-relations context. Mobilizing for collective resignation, activist nurses navigate terrains of neoliberal governance, marketization and flexible labour-market dynamics. The collective resignation is also a form of action underpinned by a discourse of gender equality. Our analysis, which attends to the co-emergence of gendering and subject formation in the narratives of a group of activists and to the use of gender-equality rhetoric in framing collective action, shows how opportunities for collective action arise that also restrain the exercise of agency. In this case, subject formation included contrasting nursing to tropes of archetypical militant workers and negotiating tensions between care and collective action. This involved reproducing and challenging established forms of gendering.
Many of the efforts made by organizations to deal with gender inequalities fail to have the desired impact. This is not only because these efforts are undermined by individu-als who disagree with them, nor because individuals do not perceive gender inequalities to be a problem. Rather, the issue is that gender equality practices may be embedded in an organizational context where other practices counteract gender equality. By means of a 17-month-long ethnographic study conducted at a technical university in Sweden, the interaction between gender equality practices and gender inequality practices has been identified. It is shown that gender equality practices are themselves based on either questionable assumptions (e.g., that increasing the number of women in senior roles will make a difference), or in an attempt to avoid blaming the victim, on reducing the salience of gendered categorization from which gendered inequali-ties can be adequately challenged. By focusing on the nexus of practices that move beyond equality work, two practices that undermine gender equality work have been identified, that is, a data-driven approach to change work and a pref-erence for simple solutions. The conclusion drawn alerts us to the fact that even practices that do not seem related to gender equality work can have an impact on the success or failure of the gender equality work of the organization. This in turn may imply that the institutionalized underpinnings of the organization need to be changed, for example, the belief that more data will help us to find more solutions, or that there are practices out there that can be implemented to wash away gender inequality.
The connection between working hours and work-to-family conflict has been established in a number of studies. However, it seems what is important is not only the quantity of work but also its quality, as captured by the job demand–control model. Survey data from 800 Swedish employees show that job demands spill over negatively into family life, while job control reduces work-to-family conflict. Interestingly, women in jobs with high demands and high control — regarded as the prototype for modern, flexible work life — do not experience more work-to-family conflict than men, even when working the same hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
To better understand the interplay between digital activism and feminist infrastructure, this study investigates #MeToo activism in the Swedish construction industry and green industry. Both are industries in transition characterized by a dissonance between formal incentives, that encourage women and others to work in environments previously dominated by white men, and the informal power structures hosting a toxic masculinity. Based on media texts and interviews with key persons from the industries, the article situates #MeToo in a local context and shows how it was embedded in a supportive social, cultural, and technical infrastructure. In both industries, at the time of #MeToo this feminist infrastructure was already in place consisting of: an awareness of the problem of sexual harassment and abuse, knowledge of feminist explanatory models, established feminist online networks, and a supportive feminist culture, which together with widespread digital and feminist literacy became instrumental in the organization of the movement. Social media connected activists and created a critical mass by supporting the uniting of conflicting identity positions around shared differences. The established feminist infrastructure meant that the #MeToo activism, by articulating a widespread affective dissonance, pushed open doors that were already half open and forced them wide. This can explain some of the movement's success in Sweden.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) play an increasingly important role in the preventative and planning work carried out by rescue services, but to date there has been little research investigating how these technologies may be involved in the gendering of the organization. In this study, I seek to complement existing analyses of the gendered rescue service by focusing on a web portal used to collect, process and publish data about accidents in Sweden. Through the figuration of the ‘modest witness’ I suggest how an apparent absence of gender in the accident reporting process may actually be part of a wider organizational process of gendering in which only certain bodies are allowed to be visible and allowed to witness officially.
This article, celebrating 25 year of Gender, Work and Organization, reflects on some of the events that led to establishing the journal. It proceeds to consider the three central elements that have inspired the journal - gender, work and organization - and how they have become more problematic, perhaps much more problematic, over the lifetime of the journal. Indeed, paradoxically, these shift have occurred at the same time as GWO and the field of which it is part have become more established. Just as the field of gender and organizations has become more legitimate area of study, the concept of 'gender' has become more complex, more contested, less certain. This also applies to the notion of 'organization', perhaps less so to 'work'. The latter part of the article considers what happens when one views the GWO itself in terms of gender-work-organization analysis, and how such questions may develop in the future.
Based on the meaning-making of women geoscientists in their descriptions of work and career experiences, this article explores the gendering of geoscience by analyzing women's hard work as a theoretical concept. Our findings show that the gendered requirements for women in geoscience involve “doing” various forms of hard work, including making one's work visible, asserting one's physical performance, and building social relations. Thus, hard work is found to be gendered in terms of being a perceived requirement shared by female geoscientists. It is a requirement that entails compensating for not being male in masculine organizations and simultaneously prevents women geoscientists from fully engaging in core geoscience work tasks. Hence, by gendering hard work and theoretically defining hard work as the work of the “other”, the study expands the theoretical understanding of the concept by suggesting that women's hard work is gendered and social rather than productive.
In this article, we suggest approaching writing as a vulnerable practice marked by an unstable boundary between bodies: bodies of text and bodies of writers. We present an exercise-method that we refer to as Monster Writing, which we have developed in order to engage with these instabilities as well as in order to address experiences of difficulty, anxiety and uncertainty in relation with the text and writing process. Though the writing process can at times be exciting and thrilling, and at other times perhaps a little tedious and mundane, for some it also presents (more than) occasional encounters with one's own insecurities, shame and doubt. We argue that this potentially more painful relationship between writer and text should be awarded more attention in scholarship on writing, and that a way of doing so is through the framework of feminist theory on vulnerability, embodiment, and the monstrous.