Luce Irigaray,Sexual Difference and Theorizing Leaders and Leadership

In the study of leaders and leadership men and women are presumed to be interchangeable. We read as if leaders have no sex, and we view the still prevailing use of the pronoun ‘he’ as an anachronism. However, it is quite apparent that the ‘who’ of the leader remains male no matter how carefully egalitarian the use of the pronouns. In our formulation of who the leader is, and what leadership is about, the same has triumphed over the different, the sexually indifferent or the One over the sexually different, to use the terms of Luce Irigaray. If the heroine rather than only the hero is to be represented, a new symbolic structure must be created if new ways of thinking about the leader and of leadership are to be thought which create a space for women other than as imitation men or excavated women. This article explores the Irigarayan notion of the absent, unrepresented she, the ‘not-yet’ of woman which lies both in the subversion of the metaphysical order and the invention of not ‘neither one nor two’, and the impact of this theorizing would have on loosening the bonds of domination and subordination which confine the leader and leadership theory.