A Celebration of the Frocktail Queen or Fear and Loathing in Drag? An Analysis of an Aids Agency

What roles do sex and death play at work? Apart from the few writers who discuss sexuality in the context of power relations between men and women, it would appear that sexuality has very little importance within organisational life. Although sexuality does rate an occasional mention, death, on the other hand, is traditionally absent from organisational discussion. With some notable exceptions that include Isabel Menzies Lyth (1988) and Larry Hirschhom's (1988) commentary on the anxieties of sexuality and death invoked within those working in health care institutions, this also tends to be the case with those who bring a psychodynamic approach to organisational analysis. With this absence of commentary on these most primal of issues, what can be written about an organisation in which sex and death is a daily reality? With very little organisational material upon which to draw, this paper attempts to make sense of the experience of working within a health and welfare agency that is devoted to the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS which is currently a life-threatening illness perceived, in Australia to be linked with (homo)sexual practises. Just as the writer was not a member of the gay and HIV/AIDS community with whom she worked, neither is she a member of the psychoanalytic and clinical community. Nonetheless, from the position of Manager as Observer, Participant and Student, she will seek to provide an organisational analysis from the psychoanalytic framework. Drawing upon the work of those within the object relations school, who have identified and examined the processes of organisational defense routines and systems, this paper argues that these defenses play a strong adaptive role within this organisation. Because the task requirements of the organisation's members are, in the main, so powerfully linked to their own sexuality and death, it is argued that it is the maintenance of organisational defenses that enable individual anxiety to be contained. The paradox may be that the defenses of splitting and projection that have created a conflicted and divisive workplace, have been necessary to allow the work of the primary task to be fulfilled. It is from this perspective, that this paper will examine some of the features of organisational life within a community-based AIDS organisation in Australia.