ABSTRACT
The issue of AIDS cannot be separated from persisting relations 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 in the UK is that of sex and sexuality. However, in most organizational responses to the epidemic this matter has been largely silent, either because sex and sexuality are defined as taboo subjects within the workplace and their discussion effectively ‘suppressed’, or because their very existence within this sphere of supposedly rational behaviour is denied. Many recent developments in critical organization theory, however, have undermined the sustainability of such a desexualized stance. Hearn and Parkin (1987), for instance, stress the importance 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.1
