Averting the Gaze: Gender and Power on the Perfumed Picket Line

This paper argues that the interplay of masculinity as a social construction, masculinism as an ideology, and patriarchy as a political system is grounded in the ontological condition of anxiety as a response to undecidability. Gender differences initiate the desire to resolve the ambiguities and incompletenesses experienced through the lack of the Other. In phallogo‐centrism this means the masculinist claim to dominate and legislate epistemologically — to determine meaning for others and resolve, deny, or banish ambiguity. This resolution is, of course artificial and embodies within it fear and anxiety because of its own contingency. This condition then emerges in particular situations and events where the resolution of ambiguity is problematic. The paper takes the managerial problems experienced during the strike by Cathay Pacific Airways flight attendants as one such example. Tensions between emotional display and rational argumentation in the strike turned the status quo on its head. Management mounted an emotional defence of its position in language which evoked rationality but which was not itself a rational argument, revealing its origins in anxiety and the true fragility of its position. Flight attendants turned the seductive skills which company training had developed into an effective weapon to mobilize public opinion. Management were faced, not by the look or averted gaze of the normally supine stewardesses, but the committed, articulate, organized and consolidated stare of rebellious employees who had re‐eroticized the workplace as a power play.