Hysterically y-ours: Reclaiming academic writing as a hysterical practice

Abstract

Yet another hysteric! Can’t bear it anymore? Neither can we! In this text, we reclaim this highly derogatory term, “hysteric,” so often used against us, as women academic writers, to rewrite the gendered architecture of academic membership in organization studies. Performing hysterical writing interweaves affects, poems and reflections with feminist theoretical and methodological inspirations to challenge the masculine norms that marginalize affective, sentient, feminine and/or other, nonconforming, different bodies from academic texts. Specifically, drawing on Irigarayan mimesis as an activist feminist practice, we develop hysteria’s transformative, response-able potentials for writing, researching, relating and eventually knowing differently in organization studies. Our account contributes to burgeoning debates on writing differently particularly by situating the ethico-political potentials of écriture feminine for knowledge creation and resistance against epistemic oppression and violence.