“By standing up for another, I derived some strength to stand up for myself”: doing queer coalition work in an Indian business school

What the paper says

Purpose What does coalitional politics entail in our everyday lives in educational spaces, individually and collectively? How does intersectional queer troublemaking produce relations of solidarity, even in situations of physically absent allies? This article describes our collective experiences of queer-feminist-anti-caste coalitional work in business and management school spaces in India. Design/methodology/approach Through the collaborative autobiographical method, we argue in line with queer-feminist coalitions that there is a need to examine our embodied and epistemological assimilations and/or conditional acceptances within business schools. We bring together these elements and follow a methodology that involves our collective reflections and writing as a way to extend solidarity and reproduce our networked strength. Findings The findings of the article include theorizing and illustrating our journeys of queer coalitional work to trouble the casteist-heteronormativity in the Indian management education spaces. We illustrate the emotional-physical labour that such coalitional work entails and the practices of creating belongingness, undoing ourselves, engaging in curriculum interventions and embodying everyday resilience in doing queer coalitional work. Research limitations/implications Our wider goals with this analytical project were not only to form a shared space by way of organising critical research and allyship work together within our liminal spaces, but also to illustrate coalitional work and its complexities particularly when multiple subjectivities and intersecting positionalities are involved. Social implications Our wider goal with this analytical project was to form a shared space by organizing critical research and allyship work together within our liminal and ephemeral spaces. We also illustrate coalitional work and its complexities, particularly when multiple subjectivities and intersecting positionalities are involved. Originality/value The contributions of this article include: (a) Theorizing and illustrating the importance of coalitional work even when we are supposedly working in silos to combat cis-heteronormative, sexist and casteist structures at our workplace, particularly in management educational spaces; (b) Addressing the call for engaging with intersectional complexities at the cusp of queer and anti-caste subjectivities; (c) Paying heed to the importance of intersubjective exchanges through multiple subjectivities in coalitional work.