Close encounters: Creating embodied spaces of resistance to marginalization and disempowering representation of difference in organization

In this paper I approach questions of representation from a viewpoint that adopts postcolonial feminism as a starting point for theorizing new orientations for the study of corporeal ethics and difference in organizations. Specifically, I draw on the works of Sara Ahmed and Gayatri Spivak to open up a notion of a close encounter to reflect how we could encounter others in a generous way as a basis for ethical engagement with difference in organizations. Embracing an understanding of self–other relations as embodied practices that materialize in concrete worlds but transcend times, places, and spaces, close encounters provide an alternative epistemological position to imagine ethical subjectivities in organizations through which withdrawal from the essentialist representations that guide our understanding of difference is possible and resistance to the dominant gendered and racialized identities can take place. This perspective offers important implications for rethinking the basis of feminist alliances, participative epistemologies and difference in postcoloniality.