Resistance Is Not Futile: Liberating Captain Janeway from the Masculine‐Feminine Dualism of Leadership

Abstract

the boundary between science-fiction and social reality is an optical illusion' (Haraway, 1990, p. 191) My underlying purpose in this article is to uncover the way in which research on leadership has been constrained by a reliance on the categories male-female and/or masculine-feminine for theorizing and for empirical work. I argue that both gender and leadership are caught within what Judith Butler calls the heterosexual matrix and that this has significant repercussions on leaders and leadership discourse. I use the character of Captain Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager as a case study. I begin by analysing her leadership on the television series. I then perform a similar analysis of Janeway as she is represented in a text that subverts her gender by queering her character. I compare the two Janeways and the effect that the construction of each one's gender has on her leadership. In the conclusion I discuss ways in which we can use this analysis to move towards fluidity in the theorizing and practice of both gender and leadership.

`Blended Leadership': Employee Perspectives on Effective Leadership in the UK Further Education Sector

“…5 Problematizing binaries such as organic/mechanistic and participative/autocratic, Fairhurst (2001) argues that the primary dualism in leader ship studies is that between individual and collective forms of analysis. Bowring (2004) asserts that the binary opposition between leaders and followers is typically reinforced by a gender dualism in which men are privileged while women are marginalized. These arguments are supported by Gronn's (2008 and this issue) proposal for researchers to replace distributed leader ship with a focus on 'hybridity'.…”

Caught in the Gendered Machine: On the Masculine and Feminine in Cyborg Leadership

“…Drawing on Haraway's (1991a) theorizing on women and superiority, this metaphor is helpful in analysing the extremes of leadership style among top female managers who break the glass ceiling. Focusing on an empirical analysis of one such woman cyborgian leader, the article discusses gendered leadership in a novel way, moving away from the usual perception that leadership is either masculine or feminine (see also Bowring, 2004) and showing how such super‐leaders perform both masculinity and femininity in an excessive manner.…”

Towards Queering the Business School: A Research Agenda for Advancing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Perspectives and Issues

“…In this literature queer theory has been applied in the analysis of 'diversity management' (Bendl et al, 2008(Bendl et al, , 2009, 'leadership' (Bowring, 2004;Harding et al, 2011;Muhr and Sullivan, 2013), 'management' (Parker, 2001(Parker, , 2002Tyler and Cohen, 2008) and 'public administration' (Lee et al, 2008), in order to destabilize normative constructions of these concepts and prise open opportunities for thinking about alternatives. In this literature queer theory has been applied in the analysis of 'diversity management' (Bendl et al, 2008(Bendl et al, , 2009, 'leadership' (Bowring, 2004;Harding et al, 2011;Muhr and Sullivan, 2013), 'management' (Parker, 2001(Parker, , 2002Tyler and Cohen, 2008) and 'public administration' (Lee et al, 2008), in order to destabilize normative constructions of these concepts and prise open opportunities for thinking about alternatives.…”