When Shame Meets Love: Affective pathways to freedom from injurious bodily norms in the workplace
研究通过艺术装置观察女性员工如何从身体羞耻转向快乐，揭示爱、集体笑声和互惠慷慨如何帮助打破工作场所压迫性身体规范，对关注组织情感动力和性别平等的学者有用。
We explore organizational members’ affective experiences to elucidate how and when the reproduction of oppressive bodily norms can be interrupted. We leverage the exceptional access to hitherto overlooked affective dynamics in one organizational context made possible by the introduction of a video art installation in a commercial art gallery. The artwork enabled both the all-female staff and the researchers to observe, feel and reflect on both the invisible force of body shame and the empowering forces of communal laughter and reciprocal generosity. Our analysis reveals how the repetition of loving encounters around the artwork moved the staff away from crippling individualized anxiety and shame and towards more joyful and carefree possibilities. It further suggests that the organization’s feminist culture and climate of psychological safety facilitated the trajectory from shame to joy through love. By surfacing and explaining such affective pathways to freedom as an important form of emancipatory politics in the context of injurious, discriminatory bodily norms, we contribute to both scholarship on bodily discipline in the workplace and recent work on the critical potential of affect.