Queer Labor

Despite significant civil rights, political, and workplace equality gains, LGBTQ people still face significant barriers to true organizational equality, all the way from entry-level positions up to the C-suite. This chapter begins by previewing some of the scholarship on queerness, organizations, and labor and some of the challenges faced by LGBTQ workers. This chapter then attempts to put queer theory, based largely in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, in conversation with business fields. I attempt to translate queer theory for a more general audience, a formidable task given the ways that queer theorists are often lambasted and lampooned in the popular press for a writing style that is often seen as turgid, obscurantist, disconnected from the “real world” and materiality, and unnecessarily complicated, despite the fact that queer theorists seek to explore the complex and ever-changing connections and disjunctures between genders, sexualities, embodiments, and performances of self. It is my belief that a greater attention to queer work in the humanities and social sciences (and the translation of this work for new audiences by queer scholars) can help move us beyond the dearth of data on LGBTQ people, particularly LGBTQ people of color, and help us think more broadly about the ways that LGBTQ workplace issues intersect with other forms of difference and alterity. I end the chapter by offering some provisional solutions, based in part on my own work in queer media and cultural studies of labor, constructions of gender and sexuality, and intra-communal abjection.