The illustrated Post Office: a layered account of organisational sexism, brutality and escape

Reading the works of Charles Bukowski is a male, and by extension, masculine activity, and as such it can make a female reader feel as if she is trespassing into some male preserve. Arguably, in entering many organisations, women experience similar feelings. The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of the process of reading Charles Bukowski's novel Post Office as a woman.

In order to evoke her response to the text of Post Office and to reclaim her feminine identity in the face of Bukowski's masculinist project, the author adopts a multilayered, art‐based methodological approach using Bukowski's text as well as her own, Bukowski's biographer's, texts of a number of theorists of research methodology, visual illustrations and notes.

Through the original use of arts‐based methodology, the paper offers insights into the embodied, situated experience of reading Post Office, and gives an account of the author's reflections on organisational sexism, brutality and escape in the novel.

Drawing the attention to the multilayered interweavings of novel, author, organisation, analyst and discipline, the paper moves us beyond a representational reading of Post Office to consider the materiality of the text within the productive assemblage of organisational theory.