Anticipating resistance: Teaching gender and management to business school students

Abstract

Gender perspectives and feminism are rarely considered legitimate in business school education. Existing research tells us that those who teach in business schools do so in conditions where feminist theories and pedagogy evoke resistance and where their work is paved with discomfort caused by tensions between feminist and neoliberal idea(l)s. We argue that for those challenging the status quo in the business school through teaching, the impact of the threat of resistance can be as “real” as that of realized resistance. In this paper, we engage with collaborative autoethnography and elucidate how our anticipation of resistance shapes the way we teach, even when resistance does not materialize in the classroom. Building on reflections of our shared experiences, we theorize anticipated resistance as productive in and of itself, challenging the conventional view of resistance as brought into being through resisting practices at a specific time and place.