Representation of Latin America in Pan American Airways : decolonial feminism on a multi-national

Abstract

The field of management and organisation studies (MOS) adopted intersectionality framework from women-of-colour feminists to explain exclusion from power domains, according to gender, race, and class. A criticism of intersectionality is a lack of application to empirical research (Davis, 2011), and infrequent accounting of race, gender, and class as social constructs situated in history (Acker, 2006; Collins, 2000). This thesis applies an intersectionality lens onto the US Pan American Airways (PAA), dominant in Latin America at the beginning of the 20th century. Social contextualisation of the construction of race, gender, and nation is conducted with a grand narrative and antenarrative method (Boje, 2001). Decolonial and a ‘women-of-colour’ thinking in a theoretical framework is applied to three questions: How did the socio-historical context influence PAA narratives regarding Latin America?; What grand narratives regarding Latin Americans were prominent in PAA’s ephemera?; How do representations of Latin Americans explore ideas of race, gender, and nationality? PAA’s three grand narratives: i) the good neighbour, ii) natural wealth, and iii) cultural difference, and the emerging antenarratives (countering the official storytelling of PAA) reveal the production of colonial dualities based on nation-race identities, influenced by socio-political relations between the US and Latin America. An intersectionality method applied to tourist ephemera reveals that PAA highlights or ignores elements of intersectionality in different contexts; created historical portraits of Latin-men and Latin-women during the first part of the 20th century, and enabled the transformation of Latin Americans into a ‘museum object’ (Barthes, 2000) for the Anglo-Saxon audience whose knowledge of the region was superfluous. As a case study, PAA contributes to theoretical and practical considerations in five different but related directions: i) theoretical contribution to MOS decolonial feminism; ii) understanding of the role of multi-nationals and corporations in the development of postcoloniality; iii) a study of the under-researched issues of gender in post and decolonialist organisational studies; iv) a contribution to postcoloniality and decoloniality theories; v) the application of intersectionality to a case, over time.