Legitimizing and Transforming the Closet/Closeting

Kate Lockwood Harris and Jamie McDonald’s introductory comments to this Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ) Forum, “Queering the ‘Closet’ at Work,” take organizational communication scholars to task for being so straight and for not interrogating difference in ways that were predicted more than 20 years ago. Rather than simply calling for such scholarship, they take on this task. They explore the closet as a “constitutive feature of organizing” benefiting from an intersectionalities lens, challenging nonnormativity in difference, and exposing stigma. By doing so, they enlarge and deepen insights about the closet and the process of closeting. They also offer five essays that individually and collectively destabilize what is known or assumed while also encouraging interrogation of taken-for-granted constructions of worker and workplaces to design and extend theory, policy, and practice. They do so by (a) digging into singular phenomena, (b) rupturing the ideal worker myth, (c) explicating barriers, (d) displacing typical theories with communicative approaches, and (e) creating knowledge from the lived experiences of and in the closet. In the end, though, queering the closet advocates for workers’ enactment and embodiment of authenticity by legitimizing a myriad of closets.

First, the essays dig into singular phenomena. They focus deep attention on a phenomenon—one behavior (nondrinking), one identity (immigrant worker), one dilemma (discourse-dependent family disclosure), one experience (Black male academic identity), and one process (transgender job search)—without distraction of related and similar underresearched areas. These brief moments enrich understandings of the closet. In contemporary parlance, the closet connotes sequestering individuals’ orientation from most if not all others and attempting to “pass” as heterosexual or normative in some way. The closet is both the place and space where one of their identities is stored and hidden from view, but also is an active process. Closeting is the ongoing dynamic of constantly restructuring through language and behavioral choices and of repairing interactively and materially. The closet, as Harris and McDonald note, is much more. As these Forum essays attest, the effort that goes into enacting and/or deciding to open the closet/closeting is compelling, and the realization that everyone at some point in the life span might engage in closeting because of some nonnormative characteristic, identity, or behavior makes this Forum applicable to all.

Second, these essays rupture the ideal worker myth and elaborate on the meanings of this “ideal.” Through authors’ efforts, the ideal worker becomes more fully fleshed out: White, middle or upper class, male, able-bodied, well educated, heterosexual citizen, or legal resident who drinks alcohol professionally and socially as appropriate, and who has no criminal record (or at least one that is undetectable via cybervetting or whose contents are undetectable because of sealed or expunged records). To this ideal depiction, one can add young, with boundless energy and passion for or calling to intrinsic motivating work. One also can add what the essay authors imply is an ideal workplace, namely, a workplace in which people can be authentic about identities and behaviors important to them and/or the group to which they identify as members. This place of employment and workplace relationships is open to transgender (Eger), immigrant (McDonald), and nondrinking (Romo) workers whose conversations might include anecdotes about their discourse-dependent families (Dixon) or their feelings of dislocation from values, families, and communities of origin (Ferguson).

Third, the Forum authors explicate barriers that are not the typical obstacles depicted by OBHRM (Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management) and organizational communication specialists. Instead, the barriers to ideal worker and workplace in these essays are not changeable with the “right” skills, relationships, background or education, procedures, and self-presentation or attitude toward self and others through training and coaching. Indeed, they are fundamental identities and identifications that can become very real material barriers to well-being and employability when enacted by self and others. As a result, more innovative interventions perhaps based on the iterative and continuous prototyping and restorying inherent in design thinking might be appropriate.

Fourth, these essays displace prior theories with innovative approaches that challenge one to consider what is communicative about the closet. Most take a constitutive approach to the ideal worker/workplace and everyday contestations, ironies, constraints, and possibilities that come from examination of that which is perceived as nonnormative. They draw upon and extend communication perspectives—family/workplace discourses, privacy management, difference, standpoints, and stigma—through recounting ordinary messages exchanged, embodied mundane experiences, interactive dilemmas, and overarching political structures—from authors’ perspectives and those of their research participants. Sometimes, the essays offer glimpses of hope for workplace and societal transformation. They invoke needs for change through calls for future research agendas (Eger), and exposure of paradox through engagement with privacy and imposed judgments (Romo) and disclosure as having productive possibilities in discourse-dependent families (Dixon). Other essays neither present as optimistic a picture nor suggest pathways for change. Some provide episodes for scholars to ponder (e.g., the irony that those who are trying not to overindulge in alcohol are penalized) and others provide a start-to-finish project highlighting findings and implications for research and scholarship (e.g., transgender job search and hiring practices).

Fifth, in being queered, new knowledge about the closet and closeting as well as other organizational communication processes can be constructed. For instance, examination of the closet/closeting may provide fresh insights about temporality, space, embodied experience, materialities, and metaphors. For instance, passing has an end point in McDonald’s essay, marked by the sequencing of (presumably) guaranteed contractual employment offers followed by revelation of immigrant status and questioning about institutional visa assistance. This change in status shifts embodied experience from fear voiced by immigrant scholars to one of privilege, especially if the search or departmental chair recounts the many ways in which an institution is able to assist the new hire. As McDonald points out, the job search and hiring process are more or less problematic depending on the extent to which the immigrant scholars sound, use words, look, and act like members of the host country. The embodied immigrant condition might function as the means through which attire, accents, and other indicators of home country force early transitions from passing to involuntarily opening the closet. Furthermore, for immigrant scholars, documents and particular questions about identity and nationality may function as nonhuman agents to which the subject is forced to admit immigrant status. Finally, this new knowledge about the closet/closeting is derived from analyses of self (lived, emotional, embodied experience in autoethnography, see Ferguson); literature review and observation for pattern explication and for relational structure enrichment (see Romo and Dixon, respectively); survey responses (National Center for Transgender Equality’s nationally representative survey; see Eger); and in-depth interviews (25 qualitative interviews with foreign scholars, see McDonald). The data themselves and analytic methods demonstrate how diverse and provocative the closet/closeting is.

In closing, I thank Kate Lockwood Harris and Jamie McDonald for making difference real and accessible in ways that can truly challenge normativity and transform the ideal worker and workplace.