In this article, we mobilize the concept of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995 Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) to explore the question: how do older gay men practice masculinity in organizations? Our research focuses on older gay men specifically, rather than older LGBT workers generally, because gay men’s sexuality has long connoted and continues to be related to sexual deviance (e.g., promiscuity, paedophilia, etc.), and gay men pose a disruptive threat to the heteronormative social order (Eribon, 2004). Thus, exploring older gay men’s masculinity practices in the workplace can provide welcome insights into how age, gender and sexuality are interconnected and contextually contingent.
Research claims older men and gay men tend to practice masculinities from a subordinated position (Slevin & Linneman, 2010 Yeung, Stombler, & Wharton, 2006), but this is by no means the only way that they may practice masculinities. While the organization masculinities literature is age-blind (Riach & Cutcher, 2014), the neglect of sexuality in organization masculinities scholarship is even more profound (Rumens, 2014). These studies indicate how ageing is a dynamic social process.
Similarly, Foweraker and Cutcher ( 2015) show that ageing poses a challenge to masculinity, which older male workers counter by drawing on successful ageing narratives and by distancing themselves from hegemonic masculinity.
For example, Riach and Cutcher ( 2014) find that ageing is an accumulation process during which workers manage the experience of growing older to elicit productive career outcomes. Some research focuses on the importance of ageing in the context of work and organization. Neglecting the organizational salience of age and sexuality can sustain organizational heteronormativity by ignoring older LGBT workers’ embodied experiences of sexuality and ageing in the workplace (Riach et al., 2014 Rumens, 2018).Īlthough there is a mature literature that analyses how organizations are gendered, the question of how masculinities are related to age and sexuality remains largely unaddressed (e.g., Barrett, 1996 Collinson & Hearn, 1994 Kerfoot & Knights, 1993 Knights & Tullberg, 2014). For example, age-related norms can require workers to conform to heteronormative expectations of monogamous partnership and child rearing (Riach, Rumens, & Tyler, 2014), an outcome of which may be the marginalization of non-normative ways of living age in and outside of work. The shortage of research that explores the relationship between age and sexuality at work is concerning because age is understood to be a significant site of social control (Gilleard & Higgs, 2014). Currently, age is largely absent from scholarly accounts of sexuality at work, even when organizational research on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) workers examines how sexuality interconnects with other identity categories such as class, gender and race (e.g., Ragins, Cornwell, & Miller, 2003 Rumens, 2010). This article addresses the paucity of scholarly knowledge on how age and sexuality shape how individuals practice masculinity in organizations. Furthermore, by investigating how older gay men navigate ageing and sexuality in organizations, we show the constraining and enabling effects of ageing as a social and embodied process on gay men’s masculinity practices. By delineating these two clusters of practices and exploring the dynamic relationality between individual action and organizational order from a practice-based perspective, we extend the conceptual scope of hegemonic masculinity. Embodying change refers to older gay men’s masculinity practices that leverage accumulated life experiences to negotiate heteronormativity for change, although such agency is constrained by individuals’ material and symbolic commitments to heteronormativity.
Older gay men’s masculinity practices that conform to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity have the effect of maintaining heteronormativity. Our analysis of in-depth interview data yields two key masculinity practices: maintaining heteronormativity and embodying change. This article examines how older gay men practice masculinity in heteronormative organizational settings.