ABSTRACT
The issue of AIDS cannot be separated from persisting inequalities of power and influence that pervade societies and organizations. Although involving inequalities of race, disability and class, the issue that has emerged most strongly in the HIV/AIDS debate is that of sex and sexuality, although significantly in most formal organizational responses this matter has been largely silent Hearn and Parkin (1987, p. 81), however, talk of ‘organization sexuality’ by which they mean a ‘sexual structuring’ whereby organizations are continually divided by sex and sexualities, one characteristic of which is the dominance of male constructions of heterosexuality over other forms of sexuality. For them:
The dominant concrete form that heterosexuality takes in this society is an hierarchical one. Thus a major, and perhaps central, feature of the sexual ‘normality’ of organizations is a powerful heterosexual bias: a form of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’…the domination and oppression of homosexuality, lesbianism and other sexualities perceived as ‘other’. (Hearn and Parkin, 1987, p. 94)
In many organizations, however, this sexual configuration, whilst omnipresent, is not openly acknowledged; on the contrary, Burrell (1984) points to a pressure in formal policy and practice towards the de-sexualization of many modern forms of organization. AIDS, though, has impinged suddenly and unexpectedly upon the established sexual configuration of organization. Not only has it drawn attention to issues of sexual orientation and homosexual rights, but it has also made visible wider aspects of organization sexuality. On the one hand, it has drawn the sex industry and sex workers out of the shadows that have conveniently concealed them
from public acknowledgment; and on the other, it reinforces the disadvantaged situation of many women in terms of their restricted access to jobs, wages and associated benefits.
